# Building a Table of Data in a Page

Some Visualforce components, such as `<apex:pageBlockTable>` or `<apex:dataTable>`, allow you to display information from multiple records at a time by iterating over a collection of records. To illustrate this concept, the following page uses the `<apex:pageBlockTable>` component to list the contacts associated with an account that is currently in context:

```markup
<apex:page standardController="Account">
   <apex:pageBlock title="Hello {!$User.FirstName}!">
      You are viewing the {!account.name} account.
   </apex:pageBlock>
   <apex:pageBlock title="Contacts">
      <apex:pageBlockTable value="{!account.Contacts}" var="contact">
         <apex:column value="{!contact.Name}"/>
         <apex:column value="{!contact.MailingCity}"/>
         <apex:column value="{!contact.Phone}"/>
      </apex:pageBlockTable>
   </apex:pageBlock>
</apex:page>
```

:::note
Remember, for this page to display account data, the ID of a valid account record must be specified as a query parameter in the URL for the page. For example:

```nolang
https://MyDomain_login_URL/apex/myPage?id=001x000xxx3Jsxb
```

[Displaying Field Values with Visualforce](/docs/platform/salesforce-pages-developers-guide/guide/pages-quick-start-display-field-values.md) has more information about retrieving the ID of a record.
:::

![The apex component displayed in the Visualforce code window. The page view displays 3 contact columns.](https://a.sfdcstatic.com/developer-website/sfdocs/platform/media/salesforce-pages-developers-guide/pages_quick_start_page_data_table.png "The \<apex\:pageBlockTable> Component")

Like other iteration components, `<apex:pageBlockTable>` includes two required attributes, `value` and `var`:

- `value` takes a list of sObject records or values of any other Apex type. In the example above, `{!account.Contacts}` retrieves the ID of the account that is currently in context and then traverses the relationship to retrieve the list of the associated contacts.
- `var` specifies the name of the iteration variable. This variable is used within the body of the `<apex:pageBlockTable>` tag to access the fields on each contact. In this example, `value="{!contact.Name}"` is used on the `<apex:column>` tag to display the name of the contact.

The `<apex:pageBlockTable>` component takes one or more child `<apex:column>` components. The number of rows in the table is controlled by the number of records returned with the `value` attribute.

:::note
The `<apex:pageBlockTable>` component automatically takes on the styling of a standard Salesforce list. To display a list with your own styling, use `<apex:dataTable>` instead.
:::