Developing Java Applications with Spring and Spring Boot

How it works...

The formatter facility is aims to provide a similar functionality to PropertyEditors. By registering our formatter with FormatterRegistry in the overridden addFormatters method, we are instructing Spring to use our formatter to translate a textual representation of our book into an entity object and back. As formatters are stateless, we don't need to do the registration in our controller for every call; we have to do it only once and this will ensure Spring uses it for every web request.

It is also good to remember that if you want to define a conversion of a common type, such as String or Boolean, for example trimming text, it is best to do this via PropertyEditors in controller's InitBinder because such a change is probably ...