Dinesh on Java

Struts2

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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Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!