How to return specific date format as JSON in Grails?

Question

In Grails, you can use the JSON converters to do this in the controller:

render Book.list() as JSON

The render result is

[
{\"i         


        

Answer 1

There is a simple solution: Since Grails 1.1 the Converters have been rewritten to be more modular. Unfortunately I didn't finish the documentation for that. It allows now to register so called ObjectMarshallers (simple Pogo/Pojo's that implement the org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.converters.marshaller.ObjectMarshaller interface).

To achieve your desired output, you could register such an ObjectMarshaller in BootStrap.groovy that way:

import grails.converters.JSON;

class BootStrap {

     def init = { servletContext ->
         JSON.registerObjectMarshaller(Date) {
            return it?.format("dd-MM-yyyy")
         }
     }
     def destroy = {
     }
}

There are several other ways to customize the output of the Converters and I'll do my best do catch up with the documentation asap.