magpiebrain

More Display Tag wonderment

I posted a while back about my discovery of the Display tag Library, used to created tables in JSP pages. To recap the tag can handle formatting, automatic export options (Excel, CSV, XML), sorting and grouping with a minimum of fuss. Back then I was impressed just from reading the documentation and from viewing the on line demos. Now I’m impressed because I just used it to generate a very simple contacts list for our intranet, and it took me about 2 hours to download the taglib, install it, work out how to use it and then create a great looking table with sorting, grouping and CSV export. To be honest, I spent as much time playing with the CSS as anything else.
Next up, I think I’m going to look at a simple way of putting form controls in the table. A prototype based on the Display Tag was built but it seems a little complex, and despite being posted several months ago it doesn’t seem to of been integrated in the code base yet. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with some simple extensions that don’t require too much coding.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2003 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.