Displaying the tabs

Question

Hi
i have tabs in two rows.. 4 in the first and three in the second... if i click a tab in the first row, the rows itself should interchange as in windows dialog boxws.... is it possible in JSF... if so what ll be the logic in it...

Answer 1

Anything is possible in JSF, but some things take more code than others. In your case I imagine you would have a bean similar to the following:
public class TabRowBean {
    public List<String> getTabNames() { ... }
/** Session scoped bean */
public class TabbedPaneBean {
   private List<TabRowBean> _tabRows = null;
   public List<TabRowBean> getTabRows() {
      if(_tabRows == null) {
         // initialize collection
      return _tabRows;
   public String tabClicked(ActionEvent evt) {
      TabRowBean rowClicked = getRowClicked(evt);
      int rowClickedIdx = getTabRows().indexOf(rowClicked);
      // Take items off the front of the list and put them on the
      // end of the list to "rotate" the selected tab row to the top
      for(int i = 0; i < rowClickedIdx; i++) {
         _tabRows.add(_tabRows.removeAt(0));
   private TabRowBean getRowClicked(ActionEvent evt) {
      // TODO
}In your JSP you would iterate through the tab rows and in each row iterate through the tabs and render them in order. When a tab is clicked the tabClicked action handler method is called to rotate the order of the rows so that the clicked row shows up on top.
The only problem with this is that there is no generic iterate tag that will let you build a horizontally expanding row of tabs, so you'd either have to hard-code your TabRowBean to have up to 4 tabs and render each on explicitly or implement your own custom tag for rendering a variable number of columns horizontally.
Bottom line, it's possible in JSF, but non-trivial. Something like this is a pain in any web framework really, unless there is a custom tag designed to do exactly this. (It might be worth looking for a third-party tabbed pane tag.)
- Jesse