Freemarker print date in template

Question

I am trying to print the current date when the template is activated. I have read that I have to pass a new Date() Java object to the template, but I don\'t know how to do that

Answer 1

Actually you don't have to pass a new Date() to your template, because placing a timestamp into a template's output is quite common and therefore FreeMarker provides a special variable called .now which returns the current date and time. You can use it in your template like this:

Page generated: ${.now}

(FreeMarker also contains different built-ins for formatting dates: http://freemarker.org/docs/ref_builtins_date.html)

Update: Works only with the latest version of FreeMarker, 2.3.17.