Where to put my customized formatting that Control Hints does not provide?

Question

To whom that know or have experience with it:
The control hints does not provide solutions for all possible formatting needs. For example, I need to display only last four digits of social security numbers (i.e., for "123-45-6789", display "***-**-6789"). Another data table column stores school semesters as YYYYMM, e.g., 200902, where 2009 is the year and 02 is the month that represents Spring (MM can also be 06 and 09 that represent Summer and Fall). I need to display the semester in a more user-friendly way (i.e., for "200902", display "Spring 2009"). Of course, I can not change data format in the table; I only seek to format the display of the data.
I would think that it takes only a few lines of java code to do these formatting by splitting the string into sub-strings, replace some of them with appropriate new values, then re-assemble them. But where to put such code? Does any documentation cover this topic?
Newman

Answer 1

Shay,
I read the document, tried it, and it worked out nicely.
There is not the getAttributeName() method in the ViewObjectImpl class in version 10.1.3.4, which is the version I am using. But the EO class has it and it works out all the same.
I don't know how long it would otherwise take me to read and fumble to find out where to put the custom formatting code. Your experience and familiarity with the technology really saved me a huge amount of time. Thank you so much for your help!
Newman