Styles

You actually have a lot of flexibility in how the table is displayed, but of course you should probably stay close to the defaults in most cases. You adjust the look of the table via two methods, 1) pass through table and column attributes, and 2) Style sheets which are described below.

Click through the above links to see different style examples of the same basic table. Most of the differences in appearance between the tables below are achieved via only stylesheet changes.

Html attributes

You can assign to the <display:table> tag any standard html attribute (es. cellspacing, cellpadding), and it will be included in the rendered table.

Likewise, you can assign to the <display:column> tag any standard html attribute and it will be included in any <td> tag of the rendered table. You can also specify a class to be used only for the column header (<th>) adding a headerClass attribute.

Note: the attribute styleClass used for the <table> and <column> tag in previous version of the taglibrary is deprecated in favor of the standard html class attribute.

Style Sheets

While attributes might be the most comfortable way to change the appearance of your table, using style sheets is more powerful. We use style sheets to make the header a dark color, make rows an alternate color, and set the fonts within the cells to a smaller version of verdana. As the <display:table> tag is drawing, it assigns the following class names to elements.

You can then create a style sheet and assign attributes such as font size, family, color, etc... to each of those class names and the table will be shown according to your styles.