Render datatable rows horizontally

Question

Suppose I have a result set with one column and many rows. Is there a way to render it in a datatable using horizontal alignment rather than vertical.
Example: Assuming that datatable happens to have 5 rows (please note that number of rows may not be known until runtime). It would typically render vertically in the following fashion:
Col1Row1
Col1Row2
Col1Row3
Col1Row4
Col1Row5
Instead, I would like to be presented in the following fashion:
Col1Row1 Col1Row2 Col1Row3
Col1Row4 Col1Row5.
Obviously, it would be nice if allowed to specify the number of columns to display prior to wrapping into a new line or row.
In the absence of writing a custom component to do that. Is there a way to do it with some JSF tag that I have not found (datatable did not seem to have the needed flexibility).

Answer 1

You can write a wrapper around your resultset which will expose the data as a two dimensional object
Then you can use something like
<h:dataTable ..... var="listItem">
  <h:column>
    <h:outputText value="#{listItem[0]}"/>
    <h:outputText value="#{listItem[1]}"/>
    <h:outputText value="#{listItem[2]}"/>
  </h:column>
</h:dataTable>Of course in the above approach, you would have to know the number of columns you would like to have in advance.