jackson2 JSON ISO 8601 date from JodaTime in Spring 3.2RC1

Question

I'm working on a REST API in Spring MVC 3.2RC1.

I'm fetching a JPA entity with a org.joda.time.DateTime timestamp in it and let Spring serialise it into JSON using

@RequestMapping(value = "/foobar", method = RequestMethod.GET, produces = "application/json")
@ResponseBody

Using the default Jackson2 settings in Spring as I've only added

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-annotations</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
    <artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.1</version>
</dependency>

to my POM and let Spring wire it up itself.

The controller is generating:

"created":{"year":2012,"dayOfMonth":30,"dayOfWeek":5,"era":1,"dayOfYear":335,"weekOfWeekyear":48,"weekyear":2012,"monthOfYear":11,"yearOfEra":2012,"yearOfCentury":12,"centuryOfEra":20,"millisOfSecond":39,"millisOfDay":52684039,"secondOfMinute":4,"secondOfDay":52684,"minuteOfHour":38,"minuteOfDay":878,"hourOfDay":14,"millis":1354282684039,"zone":{"uncachedZone":{"cachable":true,"fixed":false,"id":"Europe/Stockholm"},"fixed":false,"id":"Europe/Stockholm"},"chronology":{"zone":{"uncachedZone":{"cachable":true,"fixed":false,"id":"Europe/Stockholm"},"fixed":false,"id":"Europe/Stockholm"}},"afterNow":false,"beforeNow":true,"equalNow":false}

But I would like it to be and ISO8601 date such as 2007-11-16T20:14:06.3Z (or with the offset).

My guess is that I need to access the ObjectMapper and set mapper.enable(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS); But how do I get access to the ObjectMapper when using

<mvc:annotation-driven />

P.S. I'm persisting the objects to PostgreSQL with JPA/Hibernate4 using UserType to get JodaTime support. D.S.

Update

The config below solves it for java.util.Date but still no dice for JodaTime.

<annotation-driven>
    <message-converters>
        <beans:bean
            class="org.springframework.http.converter.StringHttpMessageConverter" />
        <beans:bean
            class="org.springframework.http.converter.ResourceHttpMessageConverter" />
        <beans:bean
            class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter">
            <beans:property name="objectMapper">
                <beans:bean
                    class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean"
                    p:indentOutput="true" p:simpleDateFormat="yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ">
                </beans:bean>
            </beans:property>
        </beans:bean>
    </message-converters>
</annotation-driven>

Answer 1

Or, if you prefer doing your configuration in Java, it could look like this:

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class RestConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

    private ObjectMapper objectMapper() {
        Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean bean = new Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean();
        bean.setIndentOutput(true);
        bean.setSimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ");
        bean.afterPropertiesSet();
        ObjectMapper objectMapper = bean.getObject();
        objectMapper.registerModule(new JodaModule());
        return objectMapper;
    }

    private MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter() {
        MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter converter = new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter();
        converter.setObjectMapper(objectMapper());
        return converter;
    }

    @Override
    public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
        converters.add(mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter());
    }

}