Last month a fellow by the name of Rick Ruemann [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] posted a reply to an email inquiry of mine, turning me on to Ed Hill's marvelous display tag library (Hi Rick!). It turns out that Ed's web site URL is actually http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display-0.8/ (implying that Ed might have even a newer version of the tag library now, but I digress...) :
>From: Rick Reumann [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] >Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 8:02 PM >To: Struts Users Mailing List >Subject: Re: Ideas for doing a spreadsheet-styled tables using Struts tags > >On Thursday, October 10, 2002, 7:55:21 PM, David wrote: > >DM> I am currently looking for ideas on ways to display potentially >DM> large amounts of data in a spreadsheet format using Struts. > > Check out using this display tag: > http://edhill.its.uiowa.edu/display/ > > I couldn't live without it:) (Even will provide a link that you > can click on to export the display to Excel). > > Excellent tag. > >-- > >Rick >mailto:maillist@;reumann.net Since then, with Rick's help (and Rick deserves a lot of credit for figuring out how to use this display tag library by the way), I have managed to implement the display tag in my Struts based application and it seems to work just fine. The problem? My code is ugly as sin! It's so bad, that after glancing over my shoulder the other day, one of my best friends at work (Hi Russ!) has already warned me that it will undoubtedly fail the upcoming code review. He's got a point too - it is Coyote Ugly Code! The reason is that neither Rick nor I have figured out a way to make Ed Hill's display tag live peacefully with Struts logic iterate tags. As a result, I have JSP code which looks something like the following : <% FooBarBean FooBarBean = (FooBarBean)request.getAttribute(FooBarBean.LOOKUP_KEY); %> <display:table name="FooBarBean" property="fundList" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="569" styleClass="DataTableBorder" scope="request"> <!-- <display : table name="FooBarBean" cellpadding="4" property="fundList" width="550" scope="request"> --> <tr><td class="FooBarTableTitle" height="20"> Beautiful Looking Spreadsheet in the Broswer Brought to you by Hideously Ugly Looking Code</td></tr> <display:setProperty name="basic.show.header" value="true" /> <display:column property="fundCode" align="right" styleClass="FooBarStyle" headerStyleClass="FooBarDataHeader" title="FooBar Code" /> <% if (FooBarBean.isExistingColumn(0)) { %> <display:column property="stuff01" align="right" styleClass="FooBarStyle" headerStyleClass="FooBarDataHeader" title="Stuff 01" /> <% } if (FooBarBean.isExistingColumn(1)) { %> <display:column property="stuff02" align="right" styleClass="FooBarStyle" headerStyleClass="FooBarDataHeader" title="Stuff 02" /> <% } if (FooBarBean.isExistingColumn(2)) { %> <display:column property="stuff03" align="right" styleClass="FooBarStyle" headerStyleClass="FooBarDataHeader" title="Stuff 03" /> ...etc., etc... <% } if (FooBarBean.isExistingColumn(29)) { %> <display:column property="stuff30" align="right" styleClass="FooBarStyle" headerStyleClass="FooBarDataHeader" title="Stuff 30" /> <% } %> <display:column property="fundTotal" align="right" styleClass="FooBarStyle" headerStyleClass="FooBarDataHeader" title="FooBar Total" /> </display:table> ... and Java code to support this which is simply to hideous looking to post in front of a family audience... (Russ happened to catch me desparately trying to prettify the most hideous looking class of the bunch! There are some things which simply no combination of comments can help :-). So please, just shoot me already! Either that, or help me with this agonizing problem which is causing me to lose sleep (normally I sleep late on Saturday mornings if I stay up late the night before). Of course, it doesn't help that in this case, I have variable columns which may or may not appear (causing the need for the additional "if (FooBarBean.isExistingColumn(x))" scriptlet code. Even without that problem though, it seems that I would still end up having to in line my display columns with silly looking class properties like stuff00, stuff01, stuff02, etc., all the way to stuff29 for each of my 30 possible data columns when I would normally write a much sexier loop through an array (or even sexier - a collection) - all because Struts logic:iterate tags don't seem to want to play with the display:column tags! We have tried asking Ed Hill about this problem, but Ed has been pretty busy lately (either that, or it is entirely possible that our emails to him at his email address posted on his web site are being lost in mountains of junk mail - which is the problem I am faced with on one of my more well known web site email accounts - making useful correspondence with me almost impossible to that email address). Ed, are you still with us? Anyway, as my code review approaches, I thought I'd try one last time to spare this otherwise extremely powerful display tag library from the hungry jaws of the code reviewers at work. Of course, I could just rip out the display tag altogether and be done with it, but by doing so, I would also sacrifice the use of the display taglib's spreadsheet (XML, XLS, etc.) file export features (along with potentially many other nice features). The business group at work would not be happy with the loss of these features. Has anyone ever had any luck using Ed Hill's display tag library with the Struts logic:iterate tag? If so, then please reply to this post and also contact me directly at my work address ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). Thanks! Dave McLure Fidelity Investments (aka [EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
