JSTL - Format date

Question

Hi! I have a loop that goes through all the news items we have on our site. One of the fields is date ${newsitem.value['Date']}, given in millliseconds. I'd like to display this date in month/day/year format on the webpage. I thought JSTL format tag, <fmt:formatDate>, would help, but I haven't succeeded. Do you know how to do it?

<cms:contentaccess var="newsitem" />
<h2><c:out value="${newsitem.value['Title']}" /></h2>
// display date here        
<c:out value="${newsitem.value['Text']}"  escapeXml="false" />

Answer 1

Yes the JSTL formatDate tag should do the job in combination with changing the Timestamp value into a date object (which is required to work around the exception mentioned in your comment).

Ensure that you have properly defined the fmt prefix in the JSP declarations

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" prefix="fmt" %>

Render the output, convert the time stamp to a date value first. I'm using yyyy-MM-dd as the format pattern, the dateFormat tag supports other formatting options as well.

<cms:contentaccess var="newsitem" />
<jsp:useBean id="newsDate" class="java.util.Date" />
<jsp:setProperty name="newsDate" property="time" value="${newsitem.value['Date']}" />
<h2><c:out value="${newsitem.value['Title']}" /></h2>
<fmt:formatDate pattern="yyyy-MM-dd" value="${newsDate}" />
<c:out value="${newsitem.value['Text']}" escapeXml="false" />

Answer 2

"Cannot convert 1270738800000 of type class org.opencms.jsp.util.CmsJspContentAccessValueWrapper to class java.util.Date"

This is pretty self-explaining. It's not a java.util.Date. It's something entirely different which has a string representation (Object#toString() of a timestamp). It's coming straight from OpenCMS. I have never used OpenCMS, so I don't know if there are OpenCMS specific solutions to this, but in theory you can just create a fullworthy java.util.Date based on the the timestamp using <jsp:useBean> and then format it the way you want.

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" prefix="fmt" %>
...
<jsp:useBean id="newsDate" class="java.util.Date" />
<jsp:setProperty name="newsDate" property="time" value="${newsitem.value['Date']}" />
...
<p>Date: <fmt:formatDate value="${newsDate}" type="date" dateStyle="long" /></p>