I found an answer. Originally I had a field that was a localdate. $F{materialsClose}. I was defining its properties/field class to be: org.joda.time.LocalDate Instead, I set the field class to java.lang.String then the "text field expression" for the textField is: new org.joda.time.LocalDate($F{materialsClose}).toDate() set the pattern to the format and voila, a properly formatted LocalDate.
