Pagination with rich:subTable & rich:dataTable

Ok.. I could now get the sorting working with dataTable and subTable in my seam application. I have one last problem to tackle , how can I do pagination with data displayed from multiple subTables ? The rich:datascroller does a decent job of providing an automatic pagination if we provide it with a dataModel, but I am struck with a dilemma.. before going into details further, lets look at the following images.



when clicked on the button in the first column the row expands revealing the detail rows which are implemented using subTable



The dilemma I am talking about is , which table-id should i give to datascroller for handling pagination? of course the first (main) table's table id, as we want to display the main table's rows and let the user click on the rows to reveal the detail rows. But imagine if we have another level of grouping which effectively calls us to use three sub tables, and we want to paginate on the second grouping level, how shall we handle this ?

I quickly realized that it is not possible for a single datascroller to handle this because the total number of rows to be displayed on a page are going to come from multiple parent rows , hence multiple subTable id's and multiple datascroller components !!! I know its not a clean way...

The cleaner way is to somehow leverage the dataTable components properties which allows us to control the number of rows to display (these are the same attributes that are used by datascroller component to achieve pagination)

Similar to external pagination which we used to implement pagination with dataTable and subTable , I have to come up with a helper which determines how many rows each dataTable and subTable component shall display to simulate a pagination usecase.

incase if you have not familiar with how datascroller component achieves pagination try this on your dataTable

     
                  
                         #{detail.name}
                 
                 
                         #{detail.place}
                 
    

The attribute "first" indicates the first row to display and the "rows" attribute the number of rows. As you might have guessed the above snippet displays the page "2" .

I will have to use the above scheme to simulate pagination across multiple subTables