Problem with two-way converter for Date

["Bingel, Michael" <Mi...@paybox.net>]

Hi there,

we are creating a little internal web application with a lot of data fields.

Instead of using BeanUtils.copyProperties( ) with form and database beans 
we just have a form container which already includes the database beans.
So when data is submitted, it directly ends up in the database beans.

Our problem are the date fields, for which I already created a converter
with the help of all the usefull postings in this mailing list. The dates
are stored correctly when they have the format "yyyy-MM-dd", but when the 
JSP page reappears, the dat has suddenly changed the format to something 
like "Thu Jan 02 00:00:00 CET 2003". And this won't save again.

Shouldn't the converter work both ways, from JSP to bean and vice versa ?

Or am I missing something here ? Help is really appreciated !


cheers   Mike


--- snip --- some code ---

  static DateConverter converter = new DateConverter();
  static {
    converter.setFormatPattern("yyyy-MM-dd");
    ConvertUtils.register (converter, java.util.Date.class);
    ConvertUtils.register (converter, String.class);
  }


public class DateConverter implements Converter {

    private String formatPattern = null;

    public void setFormatPattern(String formatPattern) {
        this.formatPattern = formatPattern;
    }

    protected Log log = LogFactory.getLog(DateConverter.class);

    public Object convert(Class type, Object value) {
        log.info("convert() - from " + value.getClass().getName() + " to " +
type.getName());
        if (value == null) {
            return null;
        } else {
            if ((value instanceof String) && (type == Date.class)) {
                if (value == null || ((String)value).length() == 0) return
null;
                try {
                    String s = value.toString();
                    SimpleDateFormat formatter = new
SimpleDateFormat(formatPattern);
                    return formatter.parse(s);
                } catch (ParseException pe) {
                    log.warn("DateConverter: " + pe);
                }
            } else if ((value instanceof Date) && (type == String.class)) {
                SimpleDateFormat formatter = new
SimpleDateFormat(formatPattern);
                String dateString = formatter.format(value);
                return dateString;
            }
        }

/*
        throw new ConversionException("Could not convert "
                                      + value.getClass().getName() + " to "
                                      + type.getName() + "!");
*/
        // hmmm, probably not the right action if converter does not convert
        StringConverter stringConverter = new StringConverter();
        return stringConverter.convert(type, value);
    }

}