Using iText7, how do I fill an otherwise empty column with a rectangle? - itext

Question

Using iText7 I wish to fill an otherwise empty column with a bordered rectangle headed by some text. The border methods seem to have disappeared from Rectangle in iText7 and the only examples I can find use them. If Rectangle is the correct approach how do I do this? If not, what is the correct approach?

Answer 1

Please take a look at Chapter 2 of the tutorial "iText 7: Building Blocks"
In this tutorial, we create a Rectangle object and we draw it to a PdfCanvas object:
Rectangle rectangle = new Rectangle(36, 650, 100, 100);
pdfCanvas.rectangle(rectangle);
pdfCanvas.stroke();
How to get a PdfCanvas object?
Either you create it from a PdfPage object you've created yourself:
OutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(dest);
PdfWriter writer = new PdfWriter(fos);
PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument(writer);
PdfPage page = pdf.addNewPage();
PdfCanvas pdfCanvas = new PdfCanvas(page);
Or you get an existing page from the PdfDocument object:
PdfCanvas canvas = new PdfCanvas(pdf, pdf.getNumberOfPages());
You can tweak the line width, dash pattern, line color,... using different methods in the PdfCanvas object.
There are other ways to draw a rectangle, but in one of your previous questions, you mentioned a ColumnDocumentRenderer. If your current question is part of the same context, you already have Rectangle objects and if you have a ColumnDocumentRenderer, you have access to a PdfCanvas object. You could easily automate your app to make it draw a rectangle around every column that is rendered.
Of course: since you never accepted my previous answer, my assumption could be wrong.

Answer 2

For better or worse this seemed to achieve my objective:
AreaBreak nextArea = new AreaBreak(AreaBreakType.NEXT_AREA);
document.add(nextArea);
float h = document.getRenderer().getCurrentArea().getBBox().getHeight();
float w = document.getRenderer().getCurrentArea().getBBox().getWidth();
Paragraph endB = new Paragraph(" ");
endB.setHeight(h);
endB.setWidth(w);
SolidBorder b = new SolidBorder(2);
endB.setBorder(b);
document.add(endB);