Formatting a long timestamp into a Date with JSTL

Question

I am pulling a long timestamp from a database, but want to present it as a Date using Tags only, no embedded java in the JSP.

I've created my own tag to do this because I was unable to get the parseDate and formatDate tags to work, but that's not to say they don't work.

Any advice?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The parseDate and formatDate tags work, but they work with Date objects. You can call new java.util.Date(longvalue) to get a date object, then pass that to the standard tag.

somewhere other than the jsp create your date object.

long longvalue = ...;//from database.
java.util.Date dateValue = new java.util.Date(longvalue);
request.setAttribute("dateValue", dateValue);

put it on the request and then you can access it in your tag like this.

<fmt:formatDate value="${dateValue}" pattern="MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm"/>

Answer 2

You can avoid having to make any changes to your Servlet by creating a date object within the JSP using the jsp:useBean and jsp:setProperty tags to set the time of newly created date object to that of the time stamp. For example:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" prefix="fmt" %>
<jsp:useBean id="dateValue" class="java.util.Date"/>
<jsp:setProperty name="dateValue" property="time" value="${timestampValue}"/>
<fmt:formatDate value="${dateValue}" pattern="MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm"/>