Hey everyone, I’m working on a Spring Boot project where I need to create tables in Google Docs using their API. The tricky part is that I’m getting the data from a JSON API, and the tables can be pretty long.
I’m trying to figure out how to handle tables that span across multiple pages. Ideally, I want to split them up and add a header row to each new table section on a new page. The docs also have regular text paragraphs mixed in, which complicates things.
I’ve tried looking into page breaks and page number changes, but since the table content is dynamic, I can’t really predict where the splits will happen.
Has anyone dealt with something similar? Any tips on how to approach this problem in Java? I’m scratching my head here and could use some guidance. Thanks in advance!
I’ve tackled a similar challenge in one of my projects, and it’s definitely tricky. What worked for me was implementing a ‘row counter’ approach. Essentially, I kept track of how many rows I’d added to the current table and estimated the page height.
When the row count approached my estimated page limit, I’d close off the current table, insert a page break, and start a new table with the header row. It’s not perfect, but it got the job done.
One thing to watch out for is text wrapping within cells, which can throw off your estimates. I ended up adding a bit of buffer to my row count to account for this.
For the mixed paragraphs, I treated them as a certain number of ‘row equivalents’ based on their length. It’s a bit of a balancing act, but with some trial and error, you can get pretty close to optimal page breaks.
Hope this gives you some ideas to work with. Good luck with your project!
I’ve dealt with similar issues in Google Docs API projects. One approach that worked well was combining table cell merging with custom page breaks. I began by creating a complete table and then calculated approximate row heights based on the content to estimate where a page break should occur. When a break was needed, I inserted a page break and merged the cells in the last row to serve as a continuation indicator. On the new page the header was recreated by merging cells in the top row. Although this method isn’t perfect, it provides a cleaner layout and maintains data integrity. For mixed paragraphs, I treated them as separate elements inserted between table sections, which required careful tracking of the document structure and experimentation with row height calculations while also managing API rate limits through batch processing.
hey liam, i’ve dealt with this before. what i did was use a custom TableRenderer class. it keeps track of content height and cuts off tables when they hit a threshold. then it adds a page break and restarts with headers.
for mixed paragraphs, treat em as table rows with colspan. it ain’t perfect but works decent. play around with the height estimates til u get it right. good luck man!