Zebra striping tables with JSTL and CSS

Zebra striping is giving adjacent rows in a table different colors and alternate rows the same color:

Zebra Striped Table

One way to do it is using JavaScript and CSS. There are a lot of articles describing how to do so. This method has one disadvantage – if the user disables JavaScript in the browser, the table will not be striped. The only way is to hard code the style for each row. This is easily done using JSTL.

If we have a list of objects of type Person, then we can iterate over them using the JSTL <c:forEach> action and render a row for each item. Even and odd rows can be determined from the loop counter:

<table>
    <thead>
	<tr>
	    <td>Sno</td>
	    <td>First Name</td>
	    <td>Last Name</td>
	    <td>Age</td>
	    <td>Gender</td>
	</tr>
    </thead>

    <tbody>
	<c:forEach var="person" items="${persons}" varStatus="i">
	    <c:choose>
		<c:when test="${(i.count) % 2 == 0}">
		    <tr class="even">
		</c:when>
		<c:otherwise>
		    <tr class="odd">
		    </c:otherwise>
		</c:choose>
		<td>${i.count}</td>
		<td>${person.firstName}</td>
		<td>${person.lastName}</td>
		<td>${person.age}</td>
		<td>${person.gender}</td>
	    </tr>
	</c:forEach>
    </tbody>
</table>

 
Even rows will have the style “even” and odd rows “odd”. Here are the CSS styles I used:

<style type="text/css">
    table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	text-align: center;
    }
    td {
	border: 1px solid #000;
    }
    thead {
	background-color: #000;
	color: #fff;
	font-weight: bold;
    }
    thead td {
	padding: 0 .5em;
    }
    .odd {
	background-color: #E6E6E6;
    }
    .even {
	background-color: #fff;
    }
</style>

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