My experience with dataTables and clay has been that they don't get along very
well, at least in the case of HTML templates (XML templates are another story).
This is mainly because h:dataTable has a drastically different structure from
HTML tables. h:dataTable expects to have h:columns as its immediate child
(with optional tags for header and footer rows nested within each column),
whereas HTML TABLE tags expect to have TR (row) tags as its children (or TR
tags nested within a TBODY), with the column (TD) tags nested within each row.
Essentially, from the point of view of an h:dataTable, a column contains rows,
but in an HTML TABLE, a row contains columns, which makes mapping between the
two extremely difficult. It can be done, but it involves making a lot of dummy
jsfid="void" tags and using SPAN tags to cause elements that wouldn't be
visible in the mockup to be rendered at runtime.
e.g.,
<table jsfid="h:dataTable" var="foo" value="#{bar.list}"
><tr jsfid="void" allowBody="false">
<th>Mock Heading</th>
</tr><tr jsfid="void"
><td jsfid="h:column">
#{foo.name}
<span jsfid="h:outputText" value="Real Heading"
facetName="header"></span>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Note that the lack of whitespace around the TR elements is intentional to avoid
(blank) text elements winding up as children of the h:dataTable component
(which is very nasty and breaks everything!).
As you can see, writing an HTML template for a dataTable gets extremely ugly
very quickly. For this reason, I don't recommend doing it unless you REALLY
want to be able to view the mockup in a browser before deploying it. You're
better off defining the template in XML and just referring to it in the parent
template, e.g.,
<table jsfid="my:customtable" allowBody="false">
Table goes here.
</table>
What we really need is a new JSF component that provides the same capabilities
as dataTable but is structured more like HTML TABLE tags.
Rich Eggert
Member of Technical Staff
Proteus Technologies, LLC
http://www.proteus-technologies.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Zheng, Xiahong [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thu 4/10/2008 2:22 PM
To: user@shale.apache.org
Subject: FW: [Shale Clay]
I couldn't seem to understand by looking at the clay usecase example.
Can somebody post a simple example of using clay to generate a dynamic
data table, the equivalent of the JSF h:dataTable tag?
