Question

I need to style a ton of different elements (read: “cells”) in a PDF using iTextSharp. Label, header, subheader, number, etc. Right now, I’m using three different methods for each cell type:

public static PdfPCell GetDefaultCell(string strText)
    {
        PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(strText, GetDefaultFont()));
        cell.Border = 0;
        return cell;
    }

public static PdfPCell GetDefaultCell(string strText, int iColspan)
    {
        PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(strText, GetDefaultFont()));
        cell.Border = 0;
        cell.Colspan = iColspan;
        return cell;
    }

public static PdfPCell GetDefaultCell(string strText, int iColspan, int iAlign)
    {
        PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(strText, GetDefaultFont()));
        cell.Border = 0;
        cell.Colspan = iColspan;
        cell.HorizontalAlignment = iAlign;
        return cell;
    }

Where “Default” is substituted with the cell type for each set of three methods. I don’t think this scales. Especially if I end up with more than the 20 or 30 types I have now. What if I want to modify more than just the colspan and horizontalalignment attributes? Can I use delegates here? The only difference in my method calls is the name and the GetXFont() call within the method.

Answer 1

You can pass a delegate to the method which returns the font:

public static PdfPCell GetCell(string strText, Func<Font> fontCreator)
{
    PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(strText, fontCreator()));
    cell.Border = 0;
    return cell;
}

var cell = GetCell("...", () => GetDefaultFont());

But why don’t you simply pass the font directly to the method?

public static PdfPCell GetCell(string strText, Font font)
{
    PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(strText, font));
    cell.Border = 0;
    return cell;
}

var cell = GetCell("...", GetDefaultFont());