My Thoughts !

I've been using display-tag for a while and didn't find any troubles with it. The sorting, pagination, decorators, styles, export - everything is perfect. Its a jsp tag, simple and neat to use. After a long time I'm using something which is supposed to be how it should be! I was wondering does it has any drawbacks? Voila! There came a new requirement.

The table that I'm displaying contained several columns (around 20). The users of the gui will not use all the columns. So my graphics designer came out with a small java script that will dynamically hide/show the selected columns. The trouble lies in the Java Script. The logic needs a unique id for every cell. But the display-tag doesn't create any ids. I tried posting to the mailing list, still no solution. So one possible solution is to hack the library, and modify it to generate the id(The good thing about open source).

I thought I'll do it today. I downloaded the source code and tried to build it. It uses Maven to build. So I downloaded and installed it and tried to build again. Its the first time and Maven was downloading all dependencies and creating a repoisitory. Its took one hour to build it. All through the process I was wondering, what if I make changes, build it and use that version of the library. Suppose in future there is a bug in my patch or another enhancement is needed over this, how are the other going to do that? Follow the same procedure? Is it really worth going for all this pain? I'm still hesitant to do it. Anyone knows any good solution?