title: Modelmapper to convert from String to LocalDate
body: <p>My DTO is having date field in String format. My entity is having date as LocalDate. Currently I am skipping it from map and then later manually explicitly setting it (String to Date and vis-versa). </p>
  
  <p>is it possible to convert it automatically? I tried Converter inside spring bean but it gives me lot of compile errors (type Converter does not take parameters, does not override convert method - also lot of error for convert() as well). </p>
  
  <pre><code>@Bean
  public ModelMapper studentModelMapper() {
  ....    
      Converter&lt;String, LocalDate&gt; toStringDate = new AbstractConverter&lt;String, LocalDate&gt;() {
          protected String convert(String source) {
              return source == null ? null : new LocalDate(source);
          }
      };
  ....
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am not very familiar with modelmapper. Any help is greatly appreciated.  </p>
  
  <p>As suggested I tried with LocalDate for DTO but the problem is when I send this entity at front (REST call) I get following JSON.</p>
  
  <pre><code>"dateOfBirth": {
     "year": 1972,
     "month": "JANUARY",
     "monthValue": 1,
     "dayOfMonth": 4,
     "dayOfWeek": "TUESDAY",
     "era": "CE",
     "dayOfYear": 4,
     "leapYear": true,
     "chronology": {
        "id": "ISO",
        "calendarType": "iso8601"
     }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My front end developer need "YYYY-MM-DD". </p>