grails-ui datatable in-line cell editing and dates

Today I am playing with the cool in-line cell editing feature of gui:datatable. I wasn't able to get the datePicker working however until I found the solution in a comment on Matthew Taylor's blog.

Apparently, one has to transform the date into a JSON compatible shape. Lucky for us, Matthew has already provided us with such a method:

grailsUITagLibService.dateToJs(myDateObject)

Okay, parsing the String back to a date in the controller was hard work for me. What has been suggested by Matthew in his DemoController produces exceptions. I had to put some own effort into this:

else if(params.field == "date")
         {
          def simpleDateFormat = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("E MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss ZZZZZZZ", Locale.ROOT);

          Date date = simpleDateFormat.parse(params.newValue)
          passage.date = date
         }