Tables with merged cells, gridspan and grid cols

[pandaadb]

Hi,

I am getting desperate now, cause my table won't render the way I want it to. i was looking at this previous post (viewtopic.php?f=6&t=212&p=529&hilit=gridspan&sid=1e302d3cbcd018686d53fbb5af528e81#p529) but it didn't help me too much, since I think that my table itself is build wrong. So any help would be greatly appreciated. I am trying to describe how I did it as detailed as possible:

1. I am creating a table. I use the ObjectFactory for this, since I thought that with merged cells the TblFactory class would be wrong, because it allready creates every cell.

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TblPr tblPr = objFactory.createTblPr();
        table.setTblPr(tblPr);
        TblWidth tblW = objFactory.createTblWidth();
        tblW.setW( BigInteger.valueOf( 8 * columnWidth ));
        tblW.setType( "dxa" );
        tblPr.setTblW( tblW );


The columnwidth atribute I get like the following. I take the whole page and devide it by aight (cause this is the count of columns I want to have, so I can merge them into a construct I want to use):

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List<SectionWrapper> sections = parent.getDocumentModel().getSections();
        return sections.get( sections.size() - 1 ).getPageDimensions().getWritableWidthTwips();


The parent is the WordprocessingMLPackage class. I got this from the examples off the cvs.

after that, I thought that I need to craete the gridCol objects, to tell my table where the columns can be. I thought, that I would create 8 gridCols and the last one would be the width of my whole page. So I did this:

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void applyTableGrid( final Tbl table, final int width) {
        TblGrid tblGrid = objFactory.createTblGrid();
       
        for( int i = 1; i < 9; i++) {
            TblGridCol col = objFactory.createTblGridCol();
            col.setW( BigInteger.valueOf( i * width ) );
            tblGrid.getGridCol().add( col );
        }
       
        table.setTblGrid( tblGrid );
    }


The width argument is the columnwidth from before. Now I have 8 gridCols in my table.

So in a first step, which I will use as example, because I guess if I know how that one works, I can construct the rest by myself, I want to create two cells. Cell1 will have a span of 2 columns, cell2 will have a span of 6 columns, so together they should fill the whole page.

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int line;
        for ( line = 0;  line < 4 ; line++ ) {
           
            Tr tr = objFactory.createTr();
            Tc tc0 = objFactory.createTc();
            tr.getEGContentCellContent().add( tc0 );
           
            addFormattedRun( tc0, TABLE_HEADERS[ line ] );
            table.applyGridSpan( tc0, 2 );

            Tc tc1 = objFactory.createTc();
            tr.getEGContentCellContent().add( tc1 );
           
           table.applyGridSpan( tc1 , 6 );
            List<Object> tcContent = tc1.getEGBlockLevelElts();
            tcContent.addAll( getContent( line, case ) );
            if ( tcContent.size() > 1 ) {
                tcContent.remove( 0 );
            }
            table.getTable().getEGContentRowContent().add( tr );
        }


This is creating 4 Tr objects and filling them with content. On every TC object I invoke the applyGridSpan method, which looks like this:

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    void applyGridSpan( final Tc cell, final int span ) {
        TcPr tcPr = objFactory.createTcPr();
        TblWidth tblWidth = objFactory.createTblWidth();
        tblWidth.setType( "dxa" );
        tblWidth.setW( BigInteger.valueOf( columnWidth * span ) );
        tcPr.setTcW( tblWidth  );
        if ( span > 1) {
            GridSpan gridSpan = objFactory.createTcPrInnerGridSpan();
            gridSpan.setVal(BigInteger.valueOf(span));
            tcPr.setGridSpan(gridSpan);
        }
        cell.setTcPr(tcPr);
    }


So on my properties, I first set the width of the cell. I calculate it from the span multiplied by the column width which I calculated before. Those values are always alligned with the GridCol Objects I created on the table, so they should fit. After that I apply the GridSpan Object on my cell.

When I use this code, my cells both have the exact same width. They look like a regular 2 column table where each column takes 50 % of the space. I created a word document with an example table and looked at the XML and it seems that mine is pretty much the same (except for the GridCol, but I figured that might be because I calculated mine differently - I am not exactly sure though).

So is there something I am missing here? I am kind of stuck at this point because the rest of my rows in that table have more spans and weirder constructs.

I hope someone can help me with this.

Best regards,
-- artur

[pandaadb]

Hey there, me again.

Like so often, the second you ask for help, you see what's wrong. My table works now in OpenOffice3.org and MS Word 07.
Here is what I did wrong (for future reference, maybe someone will do the same thing )

My code works just fine. You really can't use TblFactory, because it creates every cell, so the span can't really span, cause there are other cells next to it that need the space (at least that's how I think it is). So you still might wanna use the TblFactory but you have to make sure that there are no rows in it, so I guess you can either create it with zero in the argument, or you can get it's content list and clear it manually.

Here is what I did wrong. All the time I thought that the atribute on GridCol is a starter point for the column (which is so stupid, cause the argument is called "w"). Well.. it's the width. So what I did was to create 8 grid col, and each of them had a greater width then the one before. So the 8. column would be as big as my whole page. When I changed my code to create 8 equally sized columns and then creater tr and tc objects, everything works.

thanks anyway - if nothing else then at least for reading my post

cheers!
-- artur