Hi,

In the (seam) project I'm currently working on,

we represent dates in our model as a string, with a specific format (yyyyDDmm).

However, we don't want to represent the user with this internal format, but with a different format (dd-MM-yyyy).

I tried to solve this by writing a custom converter and add that to the rich:calendar control.

This converter uses the default DateConverter to convert the GUI datestring (from dd-MM-yyyy) to a date, and then uses

our internal converter to convert this date to the internal string format (yyyyMMdd), and vice-versa.

dd-MM-yyyy ->(internalconverter)-> date ->(defaultDateConverter)-> yyyyMMdd

yyyyMMdd ->(defaultDateConverter)-> date ->(internalConverter)-> dd-MM-yyyy

@Name("filterDateConverter")

@BypassInterceptors

@Converter

public class FilterDateConverter extends DateConverter {

    @Override

    public Object getAsObject(FacesContext context, UIComponent component, String value) {

        final Object date = super.getAsObject(context, component, value);

        return getConverter().toString(date);

    }

    @Override

    public String getAsString(FacesContext arg0, UIComponent arg1, Object arg2) {

        final Object date = getConverter().fromString((String)arg2);

        return super.getAsString(arg0, arg1, date);

    }

    private DateDataTypeConverterImpl getConverter() {

        return (DateDataTypeConverterImpl)Component.getInstance(DateDataTypeConverterImpl.class, true);

    }

}

And in the gui:

         <rich:calendar
                value="#{filterKolom.waarde}"
                id="#{'waarde_calendar_'}#{filterKolom.number}"
                required="true"
                popup="true" datePattern="dd-MM-yyyy" showApplyButton="false"
                enableManualInput="true" cellWidth="24px" cellHeight="22px" style="width:200px"
                converter="filterDateConverter">
            </rich:calendar>         

Unfortunately, this doesn't work.

the org.richfaces.component.UICalendar class assumes that if the value is a string,

it knows how to convert the string to a date and tries to convert 20100824 to a date using dd-MM-yyyy,

which obviously doesn't work. (see UICalendar.getAsDate(Object date))

I solved this by wrapping our internal string in a wrapped class (which isn't a String), but I was wondering if there is a good reason

why UICalendar doesn't use the custom converter for strings. or should I raise a bug for this?