Question

In my spring web application I have arraylist in model attribute which I want to show in table format in JSP. I need to arrange the list items in the two columns dynamically. Below is code which creates only one column but I need to arrange then in even odd pair in two columns.

 <table>
    <c:forEach items="${artifact.answerOptions}" var="answeroption" varStatus="status">
    <tr>
      <td>
      <form:radiobutton path="choosenAnswers" value="${answeroption}"/>
    <label for="choosenAnswers" class="lowerlabel"><c:out value="${answeroption.answerText}"/></label>
      </td>
    </tr>
    </c:forEach>
   </table>

Here answerOptions is the list of AnswerOption beans which has answerText property.
Above code creates table but with one column, but I need them to arrange in even odd manner like below:

<table>
  <tr>
     <td> List Item 1</td>
     <td> List Item 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
     <td> List Item 3</td>
     <td> List Item 4</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
     <td> List Item 5</td>
     <td> List Item 6</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Answer 1

Use the begin, end and step attributes instead. You could let it iterate by 2 and get the list items by index directly.

<table>
  <c:forEach begin="0" end="${fn:length(artifact.answerOptions)}" step="2" varStatus="loop">
    <tr>
      <td>${artifact.answerOptions[loop.index]}</td>
      <td>${artifact.answerOptions[loop.index + 1]}</td>
    </tr>
  </c:forEach>
</table>

(no this doesn’t throw ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException when you have odd amount of items)