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

I am using Jackson 1.9.7 and I found that doing the following does not solve my serialization/deserialization timezone issue:

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'hh:mm:ss.SSSZ");
dateFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
objectMapper.setDateFormat(dateFormat);

Instead of "2014-02-13T20:09:09.859Z" I get "2014-02-13T08:09:09.859+0000" in the JSON message which is obviously incorrect. I don't have time to step through the Jackson library source code to figure out why this occurs, however I found that if I just specify the Jackson provided ISO8601DateFormat class to the ObjectMapper.setDateFormat method the date is correct.

Except this doesn't put the milliseconds in the format which is what I want so I sub-classed the ISO8601DateFormat class and overrode the format(Date date, StringBuffer toAppendTo, FieldPosition fieldPosition) method.

/**
 * Provides a ISO8601 date format implementation that includes milliseconds
 *
 */
public class ISO8601DateFormatWithMillis extends ISO8601DateFormat {

  /**
   * For serialization
   */
  private static final long serialVersionUID = 2672976499021731672L;


  @Override
  public StringBuffer format(Date date, StringBuffer toAppendTo, FieldPosition fieldPosition)
  {
      String value = ISO8601Utils.format(date, true);
      toAppendTo.append(value);
      return toAppendTo;
  }
}