Issue with type conversion and date formatting

[shanelee007]

Environment:
Spring 3.1.3.RELEASE
Spring webflow 2.3.0.RELEASE

I wanted to start using type conversions in my application. I followed the steps below for configuring type conversion formatting for spring MVC and SWF.

http://static.springsource.org/sprin...ype-conversion

I followed the steps and added into the servlet context

 <!-- Enables controllers mapped with @RequestMapping annotations, formatting annotations @NumberFormat
    @DateTimeFormat, and JSR 303 style validation --> 
   <mvc:annotation-driven conversion-service="applicationConversionService1" />

<webflow:flow-builder-services id="flowBuilderServices" conversion-service="defaultConversionService" view-factory-creator="mvcViewFactoryCreator" development="true"/>

<bean id="defaultConversionService" class="org.springframework.binding.convert.service.DefaultConversionService"> 
     	<constructor-arg ref="applicationConversionService1"/> 
   </bean>

I created a new class to register my own formatter for use in both Spring MVC and in Spring Web Flow.

@Component(value = "applicationConversionService1")
public class ApplicationConversionServiceFactoryBean extends
		FormattingConversionServiceFactoryBean {
	
	@Override
	protected void installFormatters(FormatterRegistry registry) {
	  // Register the default date formatter provided by Spring
	  registry.addFormatter(new DateFormatter("dd/MM/yyyy"));
	} 
	
}

Now when i deploy to the server, the context is initialised correctly and classpath scanning registers the bean.

In my form model that binds, i have annotated a date field with the new dateformat annotation.

@DateTimeFormat(pattern="dd/MM/yyyy")
	private Date revisedTermExpiryDate = new Date();

i know its the same format as the default but initially i want the type conversion to work before changing.

So the class DateFormatter has lenient as false, so i expected when submitting the form input field, that a parse exception would occur if i entered for example the value '24/15/2012', but did not.

Am i missing something here?

[shanelee007]

One small update. I was debugging and as i have joda-time on my classpath i believe spring is registering joda DateTimeFormatter instead and the parsing is not failing.

If i remove the annotation actually it calls DateFormatter which throws parse exception as expected but the exception is swallowed in the framework.

UPDATE 2:
i found why the exception was swallowed in our application, We were clearing the messages from the message context when validating.

So If the date formatter throws an exception due to invalid value inputted by the user, spring handles this gracefully and creates four error message keys in the message context related to that field. For example if field revisedTermExpiryDate fails, four new keys will be created:
recordDecisionFormModel.revisedTermExpiryDate.type Mismatch
revisedTermExpiryDate.typeMismatch
java.util.Date.typeMismatch
typeMismatch

All you need to do is specify in your messages.properties one of these keys with your validation message. Example:
revisedTermExpiryDate.typeMismatch=Revised Term Expiry Date: DATE IS INVALID

Solved!!