Duplicate ID error on JSF Page

Hi,
I know this has been debated on the forums before, but I am kind of not convinced about it.
I use scriptlets in JSF page for a looping over a collection and I have to manually assign ids to the components over each iteration. I know , I could have used a data table , but somehow the HTML mocks that were given didnt have the datatable compatible structure. So I had to loop over the data manually

Both of these approaches dont work.

Welcome to the JavaRanch, Kapil!

Don't use scriptlets. We'll help you setup DataTable to do what you want.

JSF views are not logic - they're 2-dimensional maps of a webpage, so when people attempt to make them do linear things, trouble often follows.

Thanks Tim! Yeah I know exactly what you are saying , but there is this divide being designers who write HTML and the ones who have to write JSF for the same. Changing the core HTML structure from a <DIV> to a <TABLE> based structure is a big deal right now. ( I have corrected the HTML mocks for a fresh project , having learnt from this nightmare!!). I am desparately trying to get the duplicate ID issue , so that I let the release of code and of course when people see something working , they give you some space to clean up stuff. But delivery first is what it is all about.

Well, a well-designed JSF page doesn't generally need any HTML and (well-designed or not), I have quite a substantial number of pages that demonstrate that over the years.

JSF is supposed to be an abstract framework, which is why it has plug-in renderers instead of just spitting out HTML directly the way JSP tags do. Putting in HTML on a JSF View is akin to breaking out into assembly language in the middle of a C program.

Whether the JSF renderer emits a table or a div is up to it, and there are JSF tags that actually do make div/span/table decisions. But worrying about which HTML element comes out is like worrying about what bytecodes were produced in the backing beans.