Spring Boot outputting java 8 dates in rest controllers

If you are using Spring Boot and have it marshaling your DTO’s to json for you you’ll probably encounter is handling dates in an ‘oddball’ fashion.

So something like

"dob":[1970,10,30]

An array, no thanks.

to change that add the following to your application.properties

spring.jackson.serialization.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS=false

You’ll now get the much better looking

"dob":"1970-10-30"