[JXTemplate] weird problem w/ formatDate

[Mark Lundquist]

Hi,

(I'm using Cocoon 2.1.3...)

I have something like this in a JXTemplate:

<jx:formatDate value="${theDate}" />

and it barfs:

Cannot format given Object as a Date

But if I change the template to

<jx:out value="${theDate}" />

...then I get this:

Fri Feb 27 15:47:51 PST 2004

!!?!?!?! Clearly this is a Java Date object...

Not only that, but...

There are a number of places where dates have to display on this page. I don't have a real model yet, so for right now I'm just prototyping the "VC" of my "MVC" :-), using flow and JXTemplate, with mockup data hardcoded in the flowscript. So anyway — currently all the date objects that get passed in (via the context object passed to sendPageAndWait) are the identical object. In the flowscript:

var now = new Packages.java.util.Date();

So they're all 'now' (once again, intentionally), but some of the 'nows' JXTemplate chokes on, and some of them it's fine!

So... here's what I tried next:

1) Created my own Java.text.DateFormat object in the flowscript, and used it to format all my dates there
2) Changed the JXTemplate to use <jx:out> to interpolate all my date displays, since they are now strings at this point.

The result: nice dates, no problem.

Mark