Spring 4 (no boot) with custom jackson ObjectMapper - spring

Question

Secton 65.3 of the spring boot manual indicates that I can replace the default ObjectMapper by providing my own. I am not using boot, just a spring WebMVC application that builds to a .war and runs in tomcat.
It instantiates my ObjectMapper but doesn't use it. I used the debugger to trace through why timestamps still come out as numeric and found that it was using a different instance of ObjectMapper. It's not clear to me where it came from, or why this doesn't cause it to only use mine:
#Primary
#Bean
public ObjectMapper localObjectMapper() {
JodaMapper mapper = new JodaMapper();
mapper.setWriteDatesAsTimestamps(false);
mapper.getSerializationConfig().with(SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT)
.without(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DURATIONS_AS_TIMESTAMPS)
.without(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATE_KEYS_AS_TIMESTAMPS)
.without(SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS);
return mapper;
}
The above is in a #Configure bean that's definitely getting loaded.
The approach I took above worked fine in Spring 3, just not when I ugpraded to 4.2.2. I have read Jackson Integration Improvements as well, and tried approaches listed there, to the same effect.
--Chris

Answer 1

The way I always did it was:
#Configuration
#EnableWebMvc
public class MyWebMvcConfigurer extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
#Bean
public ObjectMapper localObjectMapper() {
JodaMapper mapper = new JodaMapper();
// ...
return mapper;
}
#Override
public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
converters.add(new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter (localObjectMapper())); // use your own ObjectMapper
}
}
One warning, to quote the JavaDoc of WebMvcConfigurer.html#configureMessageConverters:
Note that adding converters to the list, turns off default converter registration. To simply add a converter without impacting default registration, consider using the method extendMessageConverters(java.util.List) instead.

Answer 2

In Spring 4 I've solved with the following xml-configuration
<bean name="jacksonObjectMapper"
class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean">
<property name="featuresToDisable">
<array>
<util:constant
static-field="com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS" />
</array>
</property>
</bean>
<mvc:annotation-driven>
<mvc:message-converters register-defaults="true">
<bean
class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter">
<property name="objectMapper" ref="jacksonObjectMapper" />
</bean>
</mvc:message-converters>
</mvc:annotation-driven>
putting it in the Servlet configuration file, usually under
/WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/*.xml