Spring Boot - Registering a custom ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer as a Bean

In Spring MVC, we can use a custom ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer by directly extending WebMvcConfigurationSupport (example here).

In Spring Boot application, we just need to register custom ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer as a bean which will replace the default one. If curious then you can see how that happens in getConfigurableWebBindingInitializer() method's source code of EnableWebMvcConfiguration which is a nested class of WebMvcAutoConfiguration.

Example

Spring MVC Controller

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/")
public class TradeController {

    @GetMapping("/trade")
    @ResponseBody
    public String handleRequest(@RequestParam Date tradeDate) {
        return "request received for " + tradeDate;
    }
}

Java Config and Spring boot main class

In following example, we are adding back the DefaultFormattingConversionService so that the default conversion should work as it is. We are additionally adding a custom PropertyEditor. Also see the comments for additional configuration we can do:

@SpringBootApplication
public class ExampleMain {

    @Bean
    public ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer getConfigurableWebBindingInitializer() {
        ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer initializer = new ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer();
        FormattingConversionService conversionService = new DefaultFormattingConversionService();
        //we can add our custom converters and formatters
        //conversionService.addConverter(...);
        //conversionService.addFormatter(...);
        initializer.setConversionService(conversionService);
        //we can set our custom validator
        //initializer.setValidator(....);

        //here we are setting a custom PropertyEditor
        initializer.setPropertyEditorRegistrar(propertyEditorRegistry -> {
            SimpleDateFormat dateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
            propertyEditorRegistry.registerCustomEditor(Date.class,
                    new CustomDateEditor(dateFormatter, true));
        });
        return initializer;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
        SpringApplication.run(ExampleMain.class, args);
    }
}

mvn spring-boot:run

We can also run the main class from our IDE.

Output

Example Project

Dependencies and Technologies Used:

• Spring Boot 1.5.9.RELEASE
  Corresponding Spring Version 4.3.13.RELEASE
• spring-boot-starter-web : Starter for building web, including RESTful, applications using Spring MVC. Uses Tomcat as the default embedded container.
• JDK 1.8
• Maven 3.3.9