Spring MVC type conversion : PropertyEditor or Converter?

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With all these drawbacks, why using Converters ? Am I missing
something ? Are there other tricks that I am not aware of ?

No, I think you have very comprehensively described both PropertyEditor and Converter, how each one is declared and registered.

In my mind, PropertyEditors are limited in scope – they help convert String to a type, and this string typically comes from UI, and so registering a PropertyEditor using @InitBinder and using WebDataBinder makes sense.

Converter on the other hand is more generic, it is intended for ANY conversion in the system – not just for UI related conversions(String to target type). For eg, Spring Integration uses a converter extensively for converting a message payload to a desired type.

I think for UI related flows PropertyEditors are still appropriate especially for the case where you need to do something custom for a specific command property. For other cases, I would take the recommendation from Spring reference and write a converter instead(for eg, to convert from a Long id to an entity say, as a sample).

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