Take the following as a sample: make the class Producto have a list of Paquete, and Paquete a list of doubles (or whatever) called primas. The results are shown on the attached screenshot

<h:panelGrid columns="3">
<ui:repeat value="#

" var="paquete">
<ice:dataTable value="#

" var="prima">
<f:facet name="header">
<ice:outputText value="#

"></ice:outputText>
</f:facet>
<h:column id="colPrima">
<ice:outputText value="#

"></ice:outputText>
</h:column>
</ice:dataTable>
</ui:repeat>
</h:panelGrid>

This is the patch file for this issue based on revision 26333.

Changes have been made to the PanelSeries and PanelSeriesRenderer classes, as well to the panelSeries metadata files in order to add the new attributes.

<ice:panelSeries> now has a "layout" attribute with two possible values:

• List (the default value), which behaves just the same as the original version, inserting its children inside a div.
• Grid, which behaves much like a panel grid, in which components are added on the same column until n colums are reached (specified by the 'columns' attribute. Then a new row is created

Shouldn't using the ice:columns component with ice:dataTable allow you to do the same thing, render out a list of objects and render them to into columns?

Not quite.

What a datatable does is that for each element on a datasource (ie an array, a collection, etc.) it renders a new row.

What panelSeries with a grid layout aims to do is to render those components on a new column; horizontally in other words.

In order to achieve the same with ice:columns you would need to know beforehand the length of the datasource and add ice:columns accordingly, but that wouldn't work well if the datasource varies in length.

Placing the ice:columns inside a c:forEach sounds like a tempting option, but as the first post states, the scope of its variables exists only while the view is created, so the contents of each ice:column would always be empty (null).