Very often we have the requirement of displaying the first column in a table to be the row number or row index. The below snippet shows how to do it in a dataTable in richfaces. rowKeyVar attribute is the candidate here and as the index starts from zero we mention #{rowKey+1} to display the row number/index/count.

   <rich:dataTable rowKeyVar="rowKey" id="optiontbl"

value="#{mcqaction.files}" var="qopt">
        <rich:column>
            <f:facet name="header">No.</f:facet>
            <h:outputText value="#{rowKey+1}" />
        </rich:column>
    ..........
    display other columns here
    ..........
 </rich:dataTable>

This displays data as below.