easytable

This is a (very) small project that builds upon Apache's PDFBox and should allow you to create tables in a fairly simple way. It emerged from the need in another project. Therefore it also may miss some crucial features. Nevertheless there is:

One can also override classes that are responsible for table/cell drawing, i.e. their drawing behaviour can be customized to a pretty high extent.

It is also possible to draw a table over multiple pages (even with the header row being repeated on every new page).

Installation

Add this to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.vandeseer</groupId>
    <artifactId>easytable</artifactId>
    <version>0.6.6</version>
</dependency>

Or checkout the repository and install it locally with maven (e.g. for thedevelop branch):

mvn clean install -DskipTests -Dgpg.skip -Ddependency-check.skip=true

Examples

There is a minimal full working example which should help you getting started.

For a bit more involved tables have a look at this code which is needed for creating a PDF document with the following two tables:

easytable table

easytable table

For the next example have a look at the SettingsTest.java:

easytable table

The last one illustrates the use of vertical text in text cells. The code for it can be found here:

easytable table

If you run the tests with mvn clean test there also some PDF documents created which you can find in the target folder. The corresponding sources (in order to understand how to use the code) can be found in the test package.

Paragraph Cells

Since several people asked me to include a way to add hyperlinks within cells I did a bit of research and stumbled across a really nice library named pdfbox-layout. Unfortunately that library will not be developed any further, but it still provides a very powerful API for creating paragraphs with "styled text" (including links as well as markup).

Therefore I created a wrapper cell type (named ParagraphCell) which allows to append

Note that the easytable API may be a bit different to what you find in the linked documentation. Anyway, in order to get your hands dirty look at this code on how to create such a table:

table with markup

Adding Needed Dependency

This is still a bit experimental and there may be changes in the future. If you want to use this feature nevertheless you need to add pdfbox-layout as a dependency. In case you are using maven for instance in your pom.xml:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>jitpack.io</id>
        <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>
...
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.ralfstuckert.pdfbox-layout</groupId>
    <artifactId>pdfbox2-layout</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
            <artifactId>pdfbox</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

Setting the Page on TableDrawer

Please note that you also need to set the page(...) on the TableDrawer in case you are using a ParagraphCell.

TableDrawer.builder()
    .page(page) // <-- This is needed!
    .contentStream(contentStream)
    .table(table)
    ...
    .build()
    .draw()

Kudos

Q&A

Can I customize the drawers for my own specific needs?

Yep, you can customize the cell drawers itself or (depending on your use case) you can just create a custom cell.

For using a customized cell drawer, have a look at CustomCellDrawerTest.

In case you want to create your own type of cell (which shouldn't really be necessary since the drawing can be completely adapted) you will need to use Lombok's @SuperBuilder annotation. Again, just have a look at the code: CustomCellWithCustomDrawerUsingLombokTest

Can I draw a table over multiple pages?

Yes, have a look at TableOverSeveralPagesTest.java. Just use startY(...) and endY(..) in order to restrict the vertical part of the page where the table should be drawn: 

RepeatedHeaderTableDrawer.builder()
    .table(createTable())
    .startX(50)
    .startY(100F)
    .endY(50F) // <-- If the table is bigger, a new page is started
    .build()

Is there a way to repeat the header on every page?

Depending on whether you want to repeat the header row or not you should use RepeatedHeaderTableDrawer or TableDrawer respectively.

Can I get the y coordinate of the end of a drawn table?

Yes. Just use the .getFinalY() method. Also see FinalYTest.java.

Does it work with Java < 8?

Nope. You will need at least Java 8.

Does it work with PDFBox 1.8.9?

Well, Using it with PDFBox 1.8.9 requires you to check out version 0.0.7 (tagged as such in git) and install it locally, i.e.:

git checkout v0.0.7
mvn clean install

Note though that the API has changed quite a bit in the meantime ...

Cool, I like it, can I buy you a beer?

Yes. Or you can upvote this answer on stackoverflow.