Dinesh on Java: Struts 2 Date Tag Example

The date tag allows to format a Date in a quick and easy way. User can specify a custom format (eg. "dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm"), can generate easy readable notations (like "in 2 hours, 14 minutes"), or can just fall back on a predefined format with key 'struts.date.format' in the properties file.

Struts 2 "date" tag is used to format Date object in two ways :

Custom date format (eg. “dd/MM/yyyy”).
"nice" attribute to format date into an easy readable notations like "this date is 162 days ago".

In this tutorial, it shows the use of Struts 2 "date" tag to format a Date object into "custom date format" and "easy readable notations".

Create action class:

package com.dineshonjava.struts2.action;

import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;

import com.opensymphony.xwork2.ActionSupport;

/**
 * @author Dinesh Rajput
 *
 */
public class DataTagAction extends ActionSupport {

 private static final long serialVersionUID = -7744420104547018874L;
 private Date birthday;
 private Calendar caldate = Calendar.getInstance();
 
 public String execute() {
  caldate.set(1983, 7, 6);
  birthday = caldate.getTime();
  return SUCCESS;
 }
 public Date getBirthday() {
  return birthday;
 }
 public void setBirthday(Date birthday) {
  this.birthday = birthday;
 }
 
}

Create views
Let us have success.jsp with the following content:

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags"%>
<html>
<head>
<STYLE type="text/css">

b{color: blue;}

</STYLE>
<title>Date Data Tag Struts2 | dineshonjava.com</title>
</head>
<body>
   <h2>An example of the Date tag: </h2>
   <b>Birthday in Date Format(EEEE yyyy-MM-dd):</b><br/><br/>
 <s:date name="birthday" format="EEEE yyyy-MM-dd" /><hr>
 <b>Birthday in Date Format (EEEE MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm AM/PM):</b><br/><br/>
 <s:date name="birthday" format="EEEE MM/dd/yyyy 'at' hh:mm a" /><hr>
 <b>Birthday in Date Format (EEEE dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm AM/PM) :</b><br/><br/>
 <s:date name="birthday" format="EEEE dd-MMM-yyyy 'at' hh:mm a" /><hr>
 <b> Birthday in Format (EEEE dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm) :</b><br/><br/>
 <s:date name="birthday" format="EEEE dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm" /><hr>
 <b>Birthday in Date Format(Nice):</b><br/><br/>
 <s:date name="birthday" format="yyyy-MM-dd" nice="true"/><hr>
</body>
</html>

Configuration Files
struts.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC
    "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN"
    "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd">
 
<struts>
    <constant name="struts.enable.DynamicMethodInvocation" value="false" />
    <constant name="struts.devMode" value="false" />
    <constant name="struts.custom.i18n.resources" value="myapp" />
 
 <package name="default" extends="struts-default" namespace="/">
        <action name="datetag" class="com.dineshonjava.struts2.action.DataTagAction">
            <result name="success">/success.jsp</result>
        </action>
    </package>
 </struts>

Your web.xml should look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd" id="WebApp_ID" version="3.0">
  <display-name>Struts2DataTag</display-name>
 <filter>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <filter-class>
            org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher
        </filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>struts2</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

Right click on the project name and click Export > WAR File to create a War file. Then deploy this WAR in the Tomcat's webapps directory. Finally, start Tomcat server and try to access

URL http://localhost:8080/doj/datetag.

This will give you following screen:

Download Source Code
DateDataTagExample.zip

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