Spring @InitBinder not invoked when showing form => CustomEditors not defined

Question

I have following (simplified to the bone) Controller:

@Controller  
public class TestController  {

@RequestMapping(value = "/test.htm", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String showForm(final ModelMap map) {
    final TestFilter filter = new TestFilter();
    filter.setStartDate(new Date(System.currentTimeMillis()));
    map.addAttribute("reportPerResourceForm", filter);
    return "test";
}

@InitBinder
public void initBinder(final WebDataBinder binder) {
    binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, null, new CustomDateEditor(new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy"), true));
}

}

The jsp:

<form:form commandName="reportPerResourceForm" id="reportForm">
    <form:input path="startDate" />
</form:form>

This is a controller I quickly created to test out an issue I had with another view-controller. As you can see in the Controller a CustomeDateEditor is defined. In my actual controller this editor is working fine; when you enter for instance 11/01/2010 in the form field this is nicely converted into a Date by the editor; also when going back to the form the Date was again nicely converted back to a String.

However, when I (as in TestController) want to set a default date on the form then this gets simply displayed a Date.toString() in the form field instead of using the returned value from CustomDateEditor.getAsText()! After some debugging I learned that my InitBinder method is not called when RequestMethod == GET. Is this normal?

I'm sure I could workaround this by not using

Thanks for your help,
Stijn

Answer 1

use @ModelAttribute to setup domain before forwarding to page.

carefully to use new when you deal with spring, it will just create a new instance of object outside spring context and you cannot use any of spring capability (such as web binding, validation, etc).

example :

@RequestMapping(value = "/test.htm", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public String showForm(@ModelAttribute yourDomain, final ModelMap map)

and at your domain you can use :

@DateTimeFormat(pattern="dd/MM/yyyy")
private Date balance = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis());