Java 8 LocalDate Jackson format

For java.util.Date when I do

@JsonFormat(shape = JsonFormat.Shape.STRING, pattern = "dd/MM/yyyy")  
  private Date dateOfBirth;

then in JSON request when I send

{ {"dateOfBirth":"01/01/2000"} }  

it works.

How should I do this for Java 8’s LocalDate field??

I tried having

@JsonDeserialize(using = LocalDateDeserializer.class)  
@JsonSerialize(using = LocalDateSerializer.class)  
private LocalDate dateOfBirth;  

It didn’t work.

Can someone please let me know what’s the right way to do this..

Below are dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId>
    <artifactId>jaxrs-api</artifactId>
     <version>3.0.9.Final</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-jaxrs-json-provider</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.wordnik</groupId>
    <artifactId>swagger-annotations</artifactId>
    <version>1.3.10</version>
</dependency>

Answer

I was never able to get this to work simple using annotations. To get it to work, I created a ContextResolver for ObjectMapper, then I added the JSR310Module (update: now it is JavaTimeModule instead), along with one more caveat, which was the need to set write-date-as-timestamp to false. See more at the documentation for the JSR310 module. Here’s an example of what I used.

Dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-datatype-jsr310</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.0</version>
</dependency>

^{Note: One problem I faced with this is that the jackson-annotation version pulled in by another dependency, used version 2.3.2, which cancelled out the 2.4 required by the jsr310. What happened was I got a NoClassDefFound for ObjectIdResolver, which is a 2.4 class. So I just needed to line up the included dependency versions}

ContextResolver

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype.jsr310.JSR310Module;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.ContextResolver;
import javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider;

@Provider
public class ObjectMapperContextResolver implements ContextResolver<ObjectMapper> {  
    private final ObjectMapper MAPPER;

    public ObjectMapperContextResolver() {
        MAPPER = new ObjectMapper();
        // Now you should use JavaTimeModule instead
        MAPPER.registerModule(new JSR310Module());
        MAPPER.configure(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);
    }

    @Override
    public ObjectMapper getContext(Class<?> type) {
        return MAPPER;
    }  
}

Resource class

@Path("person")
public class LocalDateResource {

    @GET
    @Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response getPerson() {
        Person person = new Person();
        person.birthDate = LocalDate.now();
        return Response.ok(person).build();
    }

    @POST
    @Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
    public Response createPerson(Person person) {
        return Response.ok(
                DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE.format(person.birthDate)).build();
    }

    public static class Person {
        public LocalDate birthDate;
    }
}

Test

curl -v http://localhost:8080/api/person
Result: {"birthDate":"2015-03-01"}

curl -v -POST -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{"birthDate":"2015-03-01"}" http://localhost:8080/api/person
Result: 2015-03-01

---

See also here for JAXB solution.

UPDATE

The JSR310Module is deprecated as of version 2.7 of Jackson. Instead, you should register the module JavaTimeModule. It is still the same dependency.