ui:repeat or c:forEach problem

[dimka pimka]

Hello!
I just started to learn jsf, so I might ask stupid questions or confuse with my explanations, but ... I have the problem with dynamic lists on the page. JSF v.1.2_15
I have dropdown list that have 2 options. Depends on the option it supposed to show the table with 24 or 27 rows. I would like to do some validation and highlight the exact element if the validation failed. As far as I understand, I need to generated the component with unique ID. For this purpose I used c:forEach
<c:forEach varStatus="status" items="#{customizedFieldsList.columns}" var="customizedFields"> <tr class="#{status.index%2==0 ? 'iceDatTblRow1':'iceDatTblRow2'}"> <td class="iceDatTblCol tableCol"> <ice:outputText id="[b]name#{status.index}[/b]" value="#{customizedFields.fieldDescription}"/> </td> ...

But the problem occurs when I am firstly selecting the table with 27 components and after that I am choosing the list with 24 components. I am getting something like:
/WEB-INF/content/customizedFieldsListContents.xhtml @78,79 value="#{customizedFields.width}": Target Unreachable, identifier 'customizedFields' resolved to null
I tried to put

end="#{customizedFieldsList.columnsSize-1}"

but nothing changed.

After that I tried to use ui:repeat but the problem is that in JSF < v2 they do not have varStatus implementation.

Is there any proper way to solve my problem? Or any workaround?