Set Jackson Timezone for Date deserialization

Question

I\'m using Jackson (via Spring MVC Annotations) to deserialize a field into a java.util.Date from JSON. The POST looks like - {\"enrollDate\":\"2011-09-28

Answer 1

If you really want Jackson to return a date with another time zone than UTC (and I myself have several good arguments for that, especially when some clients just don't get the timezone part) then I usually do:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ");
dateFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("CET"));
mapper.getSerializationConfig().setDateFormat(dateFormat);
// ... etc

It has no adverse effects on those that understand the timezone-p