I did investigate registering "custom" converters. Unfortunately, anything that would support non-hard-coded conversion patterns will require either a mixed paradygm usage (i.e passing a complex object that contains the value to convert and all convertion configuration instead of simply the value to be converted) of the existing Converter.convert interface or additional parameters. Since I think everyone can agree that the first option is confusing and should be avoided when possible the remaining option is to modify/extend the interface. I agree this should be communicated within the BeanUtils developer mailing list and will cross post this in hopes of getting further creative approaches to the problem. Because Struts will be responsible for providing the means to invoke the conversion (and much more) I do feel it is appropriate for this list to continue to discuss the Struts/BeanUtil interaction necessary for this functionality.
Do you have one or two primary use cases? I don't think it needs to be radically complicated, but it might be easier to tell with a concrete description of the problem to solve.
In general, Struts gives you lots of places you could pass in a date format string as a property (to an ActionForm, to an ActionMapping, to a PlugIn... in most applications, I would assume you'd have one standard date input format, so you don't need to configure a variety of format strings, although if you have a use case for that, feel free to describe it.
So if you can pass in a format string to some custom code that you write that can take a String from an ActionForm and make it a Date before it goes into your business objects, does that solve the problem? The alternative is solving the very, very complicated problem of generalizing string-to-object conversion for anything that has a variable string representation, including but not limited to Dates. (Or having a special-case hanging off of ConvertUtils like a third leg...)
Joe
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Joe Germuska [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.germuska.com "If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time." --Jaron Lanier
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