JsonMarshaller provides simple annotations @Entity and @Value for marking up your classes for marshalling and unmarshalling. However, I wanted something more than what the base framework provides - the ability to convert dates back and forth. The framework supports a so called type option to specify a user defined type for a value. This is a cool idea for extending the basic types supported out of the box. The (simplified) code for my DateType class that solved my problem is below:
public class DateType implements Type{
@Override
public ClassgetReturnedClass() {
return Date.class;
}
@Override
public Object marshall(Date entity) {
SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z");
return format.format(entity);
}
@Override
public Date unmarshall(Object object) {
String date = (String) object;
Date d = null;
try {
d = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z").parse(date);
} catch (ParseException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return d;
}
}
This simple class can read a String representing a date in most commonly used formats and return a java.util.Date. It can also read a java.util.Date and return a String representing that date.
