HOW-TO: Java 8 Date & Time with Thymeleaf and Spring Boot

If you happen to work with Spring Boot and Thymeleaf and you need to format Java 8 Date & Time objects in your views you may utilize thymeleaf-extras-java8time - Thymeleaf module for Java 8 Date & Time API.

Update (24/9/2016): Configuration updates.

Update (21/3/2016): Dependencies got updated: io.spring.platform, bootstrap, jquery, assertj and selenium

Adding thymeleaf-extras-java8time to an existing Maven or Gradle based Spring Boot project is as easy as adding a dependency and registering new dialect with a template engine.

For Maven, you add the following dependency to you existing POM:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf.extras</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-extras-java8time</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

If you are using Thymeleaf 3 the version is 3.0.0.RELEASE.

Once you have done it, the next step is to add the dialect to the template engine. With Spring Boot you need to define a bean of type org.thymeleaf.extras.java8time.dialect.Java8TimeDialect in your appliacation context. All beans of type org.thymeleaf.dialect.IDialect are injected into Spring Boot’s ThymeleafAutoConfiguration and added to Thymeleaf’s SpringTemplateEngine automatically.

Note (24/9/2016) Spring Boot introduced org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.thymeleaf.ThymeleafAutoConfiguration.ThymeleafJava8TimeDialect class that auto-configures the dialect if Java 8 is available and org.thymeleaf.extras.java8time.dialect.Java8TimeDialect is on the classpath. So the below configuration is not needed anymore if you are using newest Spring Boot.

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

    @Bean
    public Java8TimeDialect java8TimeDialect() {
        return new Java8TimeDialect();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class);
    }
}

What Java8TimeDialectdoes, it adds a temporalsobject to the context as utility objects during expression evaluations. This means, that it can be used in OGNL or SpringEL expression evaluations:

The time is: <strong th:text="${#temporals.format(now, 'dd/MMM/yyyy HH:mm')}">31/12/2015 15:00</strong>

temporals provide many utility method to work with java.time.Temporal: formatting, accessing properties and creating new objects. For more information about the extension and temporals itself checkout project page on GitHub: thymeleaf-extras-java8time

Note: The Spring Boot and Thymeleaf project setup is described in greater details in this blog post: Spring Boot and Thymeleaf with Maven

The source code used in this blog post: https://github.com/kolorobot/spring-boot-thymeleaf