DigitalJoel

I spent the entire morning trying to figure out how to get Spring MVC to allow for Null in my Date field.  I would get an exception if the Date value in the form was left Null.  Once I found that out, I wasn’t getting any validation messages for all the fields marked as @NotNull.  It turns out Spring just set the value to empty string instead of null if the field was empty.  Hibernate’s JSR-303 implementation has a @NotEmpty validation, but I decided to try to keep it to spec.

So, I implemented a custom @InitBinder for my @Controller and had an anonymous implementation of a custom editor all based off an answer on stackoverflow.com.  Finally, I found this bug logged against Roo

https://jira.springsource.org/browse/ROO-190

Using that single line in my @InitBinder method I was then able to set Dates to null.  For the second problem, I used this very helpful blog post by Stefan Reuter

http://blogs.reucon.com/srt/2007/11/25/spring_mvc_null_or_an_empty_string.html

So, now my @InitBinder method looks like this.

    @InitBinder
    public void allowEmptyDateBinding( WebDataBinder binder )
    {
        // Allow for null values in date fields.
        binder.registerCustomEditor( Date.class, new CustomDateEditor( new SimpleDateFormat( getDatePattern()), true ));
        // tell spring to set empty values as null instead of empty string.
        binder.registerCustomEditor( String.class, new StringTrimmerEditor( true ));
    }

And as simple as that I get null instead of empty string for my string values, and I can allow null values in my non-required date fields. Too bad it took me 6 hours this morning to find the answers.