How to skip jackson timezone correction in spring-mvc?

Question

I want to configure jackson to output any date/time values with the following format:

spring.jackson.date-format=yyyy-MM-dd\'T\'HH:mm:ss

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Answer 1

Approach #1: Setting a default time zone

You could set a time zone in the date format used by ObjectMapper. It will be used for Date and subclasses:

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss");
dateFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Berlin"));

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
mapper.setDateFormat(dateFormat);

In Spring applications, to configure ObjectMapper, you can do as follows:

@Bean
public ObjectMapper objectMapper() {

    DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss");
    dateFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Berlin"));

    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    mapper.setDateFormat(dateFormat);
    return mapper;
}

In Spring Boot you can use the property spring.jackson.time-zone to define the timezone:

spring.jackson.time-zone: Europe/Berlin

For more details on the common application properties, refer to the documentation.

Approach #2: Using the Java 8 Date and Time API

Instead of using Timestamp, you could consider LocaDateTime from the JSR-310. It was introduced in Java 8. The "local" date and time classes (LocalDateTime, LocalDate and LocalTime) are not tied to any one locality or time zone. From the LocalDateTime documentation:

This class does not store or represent a time-zone. Instead, it is a description of the date, as used for birthdays, combined with the local time as seen on a wall clock. It cannot represent an instant on the time-line without additional information such as an offset or time-zone.

This answer will give you more details on the new date and time classes.

Jackson has a module that supports JSR-310 types. Add it to your dependencies:

    com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype
    jackson-datatype-jsr310
    2.9

Then register the JavaTimeModule module in your ObjectMapper instance:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
mapper.registerModule(new JavaTimeModule());
mapper.disable(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS);

Most JSR-310 types will be serialized using a standard ISO-8601 string representation. If you need a custom format, you can use your own serializer and deserializer implementation. See the documentation for details.