I am looking for a method to split wide tables so that they span across multiple pages. The goal is to make tables with large number of columns readable. I found one discussion thread where this topic is covered; however, the example referenced in there is not available. Manning's "iText in Action" (2006) doesn't cover this topic.
Can this be done in version 1.4.8, if not, to which version of iText should I upgrade to?
Please take a look at the examples of chapter 4 of my book, more specifically at the Zhang example. In this example, I have a table with four columns: (1) year, (2) movie title in English, (3) movie title in Chinese, and (4) run length. If you look at the resulting PDF, you will see that this table is split vertically.
Achieving this requires more work then simply adding a table and allowing iText to decide how to split it in between rows. When you want to split in between columns, you need to organize the layout in your code. This is done using the writeSelectedRows()) method.
In my simple book example, I use these lines:
// draw the first two columns on one page
table.writeSelectedRows(0, 2, 0, -1, 236, 806, canvas);
document.newPage();
// draw the remaining two columns on the next page
table.writeSelectedRows(2, -1, 0, -1, 36, 806, canvas);
First I draw the columns from index 0 to index 2. The column with index 0 is the first column, the column with index 2 is the first column that isn't included, namely the third column. I draw the rows from index 0 (first row) until -1. Minus one means: draw all the remaining rows.
You also see minus one on the next page, where I draw the column with index 2 (the third column) until the column with index -1 (meaning: the rest of the columns).
The values (236, 806) and (36, 806) are coordinates: that's where you want the table to start. You can't define "end coordinates". If the table doesn't fit on the page, iText will just continue drawing the table, even if that means that some content exceeds the visible area of the page. This means that you'll have to be very careful when using this method: you'll need to calculate widths and heights of rows and columns before adding the table, otherwise you may end up with parts of the table that aren't visible.