Question

Is there a way to decrease the margin of the PDF reports using the BIRT API?

I tried setting the PDF rendering options to:

PDFRenderOption renderOption = new PDFRenderOption();
renderOption.setOutputFormat(PDFRenderOption.OUTPUT_FORMAT_PDF);
renderOption.setOption(IPDFRenderOption.PDF_HYPHENATION, true);
renderOption.setOption(IPDFRenderOption.PDF_TEXT_WRAPPING, true);
renderOption.setOption(IPDFRenderOption.PAGE_OVERFLOW,
                       IPDFRenderOption.ENLARGE_PAGE_SIZE);

Basically the problem I have is that if I have a longer text in a column (from one of the tables) it will get it on the next line, but if I set the IPDFRenderOption.PDF_HYPHENATION to false I will get the text split right in the middle of the text (see below).

PDF with IPDFRenderOption.PDF_HYPHENATION set to true

PDF with IPDFRenderOption.PDF_HYPHENATION set to false

So, I was trying to set the margin of the PDF to be smaller to overcome this issue, but I don’t find any documentation on how to do this with the BIRT API…
There is this suggestion of modifying the master page, but I have way too many reports to modify them by hand.

How should I approach the problem? Is this even possible using the BIRT API?

Answer 1

All I needed to do was to loop through all the handles, test which of them is a MasterPageHandle and call setProperty with these keys:

• MasterPageHandle.BOTTOM_MARGIN_PROP
• MasterPageHandle.LEFT_MARGIN_PROP
• MasterPageHandle.RIGHT_MARGIN_PROP
• MasterPageHandle.TOP_MARGIN_PROP

and the DimensionValue I needed.

Code sample

  @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
  private void shrinkPageSizeForExport(IReportRunnable reportRunnable) {
    DesignElementHandle designHandle = reportRunnable.getDesignHandle();
    IElementDefn elementDefn = designHandle.getDefn();
    for (int i = 0; i < elementDefn.getSlotCount(); i++) {
      SlotHandle slotHandle = designHandle.getSlot(i);
      for (DesignElementHandle elementHandle: (List<DesignElementHandle>)slotHandle.getContents()) {
        if (!(elementHandle instanceof MasterPageHandle)) continue;

        MasterPageHandle mph = (MasterPageHandle)elementHandle;
        DimensionValue dv = new DimensionValue(0.1, "cm");
        setAllMarginsTo(mph, dv);
      }
    }
  }

  private void setAllMarginsTo(MasterPageHandle mph, DimensionValue dv) {
    try {
      mph.setProperty(MasterPageHandle.BOTTOM_MARGIN_PROP, dv);
      mph.setProperty(MasterPageHandle.LEFT_MARGIN_PROP, dv);
      mph.setProperty(MasterPageHandle.RIGHT_MARGIN_PROP, dv);
      mph.setProperty(MasterPageHandle.TOP_MARGIN_PROP, dv);
    } catch (SemanticException se) {
      throw new RuntimeException("Cannot set margins for report export!", se);
    }
  }