Spring MVC - Customizing ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer

Spring MVC uses a WebBindingInitializer to initialize a WebDataBinder for a given request. We can use ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer to initialize a custom WebBindingInitializer.

In following example, we will register a custom PropertyEditor globally via ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer. To accomplish that, we will not use @EnableWebMvc annotation, instead we will use a plain @Configuration class which will extend WebMvcConfigurationSupport directly, we will then override getConfigurableWebBindingInitializer() method.

From @EnableWebMvc docs:

If WebMvcConfigurer does not expose some more advanced setting that needs to be configured consider removing the @EnableWebMvc annotation and extending directly from WebMvcConfigurationSupport or DelegatingWebMvcConfiguration

Note that ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer is used by RequestMappingHandlerAdapter to apply data conversion, formatting and validation for the requests.

Example

Spring Controller

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

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

Java Config class

@Configuration
@ComponentScan
public class MyWebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurationSupport {

    @Override
    protected ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer getConfigurableWebBindingInitializer() {
        ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer initializer = super.getConfigurableWebBindingInitializer();
        initializer.setPropertyEditorRegistrar(propertyEditorRegistry -> {
            SimpleDateFormat dateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
            propertyEditorRegistry.registerCustomEditor(Date.class,
                    new CustomDateEditor(dateFormatter, true));
        });
        return initializer;
    }
}

In above example, we are not completely replacing ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer, but rather customizing it to use a custom PropertyEditor globally.

mvn tomcat7:run-war

Output

Note that, starting Spring 3.1+, a custom property editor registered via the method described here doesn't work in Spring MVC data binding.

Example Project

Dependencies and Technologies Used:

• spring-webmvc 5.0.2.RELEASE: Spring Web MVC.
• javax.servlet-api 3.1.0 Java Servlet API
• JDK 1.8
• Maven 3.3.9