In Grails, you can use the JSON converters to do this in the controller:
render Book.list() as JSON
The render result is
[
{"id":1,
"class":"Book",
"author":"Stephen King",
"releaseDate":'2007-04-06T00:00:00',
"title":"The Shining"}
]
You can control the output date by make a setting in Config.groovy
grails.converters.json.date = 'javascript' // default or Javascript
Then the result will be a native javascript date
[
{"id":1,
"class":"Book",
"author":"Stephen King",
"releaseDate":new Date(1194127343161),
"title":"The Shining"}
]
If I want to get a specific date format like this:
"releaseDate":"06-04-2007"
I have to use 'collect', which requires a lot of typing:
return Book.list().collect(){
[
id:it.id,
class:it.class,
author:it.author,
releaseDate:new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy").format(it.releaseDate),
title:it.title
]
} as JSON
Is there a simpler way to do this?
There is a simple solution: Since Grails 1.1 the Converters have been rewritten to be more modular. Unfortunately I didn't finish the documentation for that. It allows now to register so called ObjectMarshallers (simple Pogo/Pojo's that implement the org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.converters.marshaller.ObjectMarshaller
interface).
To achieve your desired output, you could register such an ObjectMarshaller in BootStrap.groovy that way:
import grails.converters.JSON;
class BootStrap {
def init = { servletContext ->
JSON.registerObjectMarshaller(Date) {
return it?.format("dd-MM-yyyy")
}
}
def destroy = {
}
}
There are several other ways to customize the output of the Converters and I'll do my best do catch up with the documentation asap.