logic:iterate question

[Chris Stann]

I'm using logic:iterate to build rows and cells of a table.

<logic:iterate id="myList" property="myPropertyName" name="myForm">
  <tr>
    <logic:iterate id="element" collection="<%=myList%>">
      <td align="center" class="normal">
        <div align="center"><bean:write name="element" /><br /></div>
      </td>
    </logic:iterate>
  </tr>
</logic:iterate>
    

The outer iterator creates my rows and the inner creates my cells.

The trouble is that I want cells in the first column to be aligned to left and the rest aligned to right. How can I do this?

[ October 31, 2008: Message edited by: Chris Stann ]
[ October 31, 2008: Message edited by: Chris Stann ]

[Vinod K Singh]

Create a local variable and reset that to 0 before entering in inner loop and keep on incrementing it there. That way you will know when first column is being written and align that accordingly.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Chris,
Better still would be store the values in a form that represents what they are. If you have a specific object, it would be better to have the fields named (ex-Book has a title, author, ISBN, etc) and reference those without going through a loop.

If you have some generic query and the first column is a title/label, you could have a Row object with a String title/label and Collection for the rest.

There must be something special about that first column for it to be displayed differently. And it's better for you model to know about it than force the view to handle it. (Java code in a JSP is an anti-pattern which should get you to think about whether things are designed in the best possible way.)

[Chris Stann]

It has been a while since the original post but I wanted to update with my solution, for posterity.

I ended up using indexId which is used to index the columns within a table. If you look below, the solution is rather elegant, if I say so myself. :-)

<logic:iterate id="myList" property="myPropertyName" name="myForm">
  <tr>
    <logic:iterate id="element" indexId="rIndex" collection="<%=myList%>">
      <logic:equal name="rIndex" value="0"> 
        <td class="normal">
          <div align="left"><bean:write name="element" /><br /></div>
        </td>
      </logic:equal>
      <logic:notEqual name="rIndex" value="0"> 
        <td class="normal">
          <div align="right"><bean:write name="element" /><br /></div>
        </td>
      </logic:notEqual>
    </logic:iterate>	
  </tr>
</logic:iterate>
    

[Alejandro Galvan]

Hi,

Have you tried Displaytag? it gives you a table from a list previosly setted in the request scope, it can show all the attributes, or just what you defined, in columns, check it at: its site

Good luck,