Stop iText table from spliting on new page

Question

I am developing an app for android that generates pdf.

I am using itextpdf to generate the pdf.

I have the following problem:

I have a table that has 3 rows and when this table is near the end of a page sometimes it puts one row on one page and two rows on the next page.

Is there a way to force this table to start on the next page so I can have the full table on the next page?

Thanks

Please read the section on how to ask a good question and post your code. — LBes, Oct 22 '15 at 17:21
I understand the question. It is a clear technical problem that can easily be answered. I'll start writing an answer. — Bruno Lowagie, Oct 22 '15 at 17:30

score 12 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 22 '15 at 18:22

As an alternative to Bruno's approach of nesting the table in a 1-cell table to prevent splitting, you can also use PdfPTable.setKeepTogether(true) to start the table on a new page when it doesn't fit the current page.

Using a similar example:

Paragraph p = new Paragraph("Test");
PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(2);
for (int i = 1; i < 6; i++) {
    table.addCell("key " + i);
    table.addCell("value " + i);
}
for (int i = 0; i < 40; i++) {
    document.add(p);
}
// Try to keep the table on 1 page
table.setKeepTogether(true);
document.add(table);

Both approaches (nesting in a 1-cell table and using setKeepTogether()) behave exactly the same in my tests. This includes when the table is too large to fit on the new page and still needs to be split, e.g. when adding 50 instead of 5 rows in the example above.

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 22 '15 at 17:36

Please take a look at the Splitting example:

Paragraph p = new Paragraph("Test");
PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(2);
for (int i = 1; i < 6; i++) {
    table.addCell("key " + i);
    table.addCell("value " + i);
}
for (int i = 0; i < 40; i++) {
    document.add(p);
}
document.add(table);

We have a table with 5 rows, and in this case, we're adding some paragraphs so that the table is added at the end of a page.

By default, iText will try not to split rows, but if the full table doesn't fit, it will forward the rows that don't fit to the next page:

You want to avoid this behavior: you don't want the table to split.

Knowing that iText will try to keep full rows intact, you can work around this problem by nesting the table you don' want to split inside another table:

PdfPTable nesting = new PdfPTable(1);
PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(table);
cell.setBorder(PdfPCell.NO_BORDER);
nesting.addCell(cell);
document.add(nesting);

Now you get this result:

There was sufficient space on the previous page to render a couple of rows, but as we've wrapped the full table inside a row with a single column, iText will forward the complete table to the next page.

Stop iText table from spliting on new page

2 Answers2