Convert Date to Pretty Time in Grails and Groovy

In this tutorial, we will learn how to convert Java Date to pretty time like moments ago, 1 hour ago, 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago, and so on in grails application.

For this, we are using the prettytime plugin in our project.

Load PrettyTime in Grails Gradle project:

Add the following inside dependencies in the build.gradle file.

dependencies {
//other dependencies
 
compile 'org.grails.plugins:grails-pretty-time:4.0.0'
}

PrettyTime format Date:

Now let's create a method that formats the Java Date

import org.ocpsoft.prettytime.PrettyTime
import java.util.Date
public static String formatPrettyTime(Date date) {
        PrettyTime p = new PrettyTime()
        return p.format(date).trim()
    }

This will format the given date to a pretty time like moments ago.

Pretty Time Support Locale:

Prettytime supports different languages, for this use request to get the current locale and format it.

public static String formatPrettyTime(Date date, request) {
        Locale locale = RequestContextUtils.getLocale(request)
        PrettyTime prettyTime = new PrettyTime(locale)
        return prettyTime.format(date).trim()
    }

Here, we are using the locale from the request which gives the session locale for the current user

Current locale in grails application can also be achieved using LocaleContextHolder

import org.springframework.context.i18n.LocaleContextHolder
Locale locale = LocaleContextHolder.getLocale()

For pretty time supported language please follow prettyTime

Use in Gsp page:

If we are using the GSP pages HTML as server-side rendering, then we can use pretty time in GSP pages as below

<prettytime:display date="${someDate}" />