Question

We are trying to send java.util.Date objects to our REST resource but Jackson deserializes the JSON string for the incoming date 1348696800000 to a Date with the value 163469056-01-01 00:00:00.0. What could be the problem?

Our REST resource:

@POST
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response create(A a) {
}

The POJO:

@XmlRootElement(name = "A")
public class A {
    private Date startDate;
}

The JSON:

{ ... "startDate":1348696800000, ... }

If Jackson serializes a Date into Milliseconds it should be able to deserialize it again.. I really don’t want to write a custom deserializer for this which I then have to declare for every Date property on client and server side..

Answer 1

So we decided to work around the problem and have our client create formatted date strings to send to the REST server using a custom

public class JsonDateSerializer extends JsonSerializer<Date> {

    private static final SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss");

    @Override
    public void serialize(Date date, JsonGenerator gen, SerializerProvider provider)
            throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {

        String formattedDate = dateFormat.format(date);

        gen.writeString(formattedDate);
    }