Code Formatting in Agile Teams

Whether you work in an Agile team or not, one of the crucial aspects of team work is agreeing your team's code formatting rules. You may wonder why I’m using the word crucial when introducing this topic and the answer lies in the consequences of not using a common style.

@DateTimeFormat Depends on Joda Time

Yesterday’s blog explained the use of the @DateTimeFormat and whilst writing it, I purposely chose to use java.util.Calendar for simplicity as I didn’t want to add an unnecessary dependency into my classpath... and that’s where I came unstuck. I turns out that if you don’t have the following dependency in your POM:

Using the Spring 3 @DateTimeFormat Annotation

@DateTimeFormat is the complimentary annotation to yesterday’s @NumberFormat and like @NumberFormat it does what it says on the tin and allows you to format dates and times. The Spring javadoc states that it can be applied to java.util.Date, java.util.Calendar, java.long.Long, or Joda Time classes and works on dates sent to the presentation layer from the controller and visa-versa.

Using Spring 3 @NumberFormat Annotation

The Guys as Spring have provided a very useful annotation called @NumberFormat that allows you to, well... format numbers. It works on numbers sent to the presentation layer from the controller and visa-versa and can be applied to any class derived from java.lang.Number. It will format numbers into three styles as defined by the NumberFormat.Style enum: CURRENCY, PERCENT and NUMBER.