Spring initBinder not invoking CustomDateEditor

Question

I am trying to bind string input form parameter to the date property of a bean using following code. I want to bind the date formatter only to a specific property named registrationDate of the bean User. I have tried various ways to specify the field name registrationDate in a call to binder.registerCustomEditor but CustomDateEditor never get's called.

CustomDateEditor works only if i drop the field name from binder.registerCustomEditor call and make it global for all date fields as demonstrated by the last commented line in the initBinderAll() method in the controller below. Hope someone points me in the right direction.

user.jsp :-

<form:form action="/some_url" modelAttribute="user">
    <input type="text" id="registrationDate" name="registrationDate" value="${regDate}" />
</form:form>      

User.java :-

@Entity
@Table(name="user")
public class User {
    @Column(name = "reg_date")
    @Temporal(TemporalType.DATE)
    private Date registrationDate;
}   

UserController.java :-

@Controller
public class UserController {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/some_url", method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public String handleSubmission(
            @ModelAttribute("user")@Valid User user, BindingResult result) throws IOException {
    }

    @InitBinder
    public void initBinderAll(WebDataBinder binder) {
        binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, "user.registrationDate", new CustomDateEditor(new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-dd-MM"), false));

        binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, "User.registrationDate", new CustomDateEditor(new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-dd-MM"), false));

        binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, "registrationDate", new CustomDateEditor(new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-dd-MM"), false));

        //binder.registerCustomEditor(Date.class, new CustomDateEditor(new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-dd-MM"), true));
    }
}