How to add a title tag (tooltip) to an HTML table column using tagx and jstl?

Question

I have a tagx to create a table with head <th>...</th>, based on the table.tagx by/of Spring Roo.

To get text into the head colums is easy, but when it comes to titles, I'm stuck.

This is my current way to fill the table head:

<spring:eval var="colCounter" expression="0" />
<table id="_table_${id}_id" class="sortable" >
  <thead>

    <tr>
      <c:forTokens items="${columnLabels}" delims="," var="columnHeading">
        <th>
          <c:out value="${columnHeading}" />
          <spring:eval var="colCounter" expression="colCounter  + 1" />
        </th>
      </c:forTokens>

    [... some more unimportant code here ...]

    </tr>

  </thead>
  <tbody>
    ...
  </tbody>
</table>

columnLabels is a comma separed string containing the the labels. I generated another string called columnTitles, which is built just the same way.

So what I'd like to do now, is to add the titles for each column into the <th> tag like

<th title="${columnTitle}" >

I could probably loop through an array with the colCounter as index like this

<th title="${columnTitles[colCounter]}" >

But this would mean some more effort since I'd need to create the array in a completely different way - plus, I'm not very familiar with tagx/jstl (yet).

I still hope, somebody has a solution. I'd be very glad!

Regards, Stacky

Answer 1

Forget about having two separate comma-separated strings.

Use a List<Heading>, where Heading is a bean containing a title property and a tooltip property.

Your JSP code is now straightforward, and doesn't need to parse a comma-seperated String into a list of tokens:

<c:forEach items="${headings}" var="heading">
    <th title="<c:out value='${heading.tooltip}'/>">
      <c:out value="${heading.title}" />
    </th>
</c:forEach>

Java is an OO language. Use objects.