How to add a rectangle to every page of a document?

Why does my code only add the rectangle on the last page?

I'm using iText to create a PDF document. Right now I am trying to get a rectangle on every single page of the document but I'm not sure how to do this. I tried adding this at the end of my code:

PdfContentByte cb = writer.getDirectContent();
for (int pgCnt = 1; pgCnt  writer.getPageNumber(); pgCnt++) {
    cb.saveState();
    cb.setColorStroke(new CMYKColor(1f, 0f, 0f, 0f));
    cb.setColorFill(new CMYKColor(1f, 0f, 0f, 0f));
    cb.rectangle(20,10,10,820);
    cb.fill();
    cb.restoreState();
}

but this only adds the rectangle on the last page and it kind of make sense because I'm not using the pgCnt anywhere. How can I specify that I want the rectangle on page number pgCnt, so I can add the rectangle on every page?

Posted on StackOverflow on Mar 19, 2013 by Carla Stabille

Please take a look at the entries for the tag Page events. You'll discover that you need to extend the PdfPageEventHelper class and add your code to the onEndPage() method.

public void onEndPage(PdfWriter writer, Document document) {
    PdfContentByte cb = writer.getDirectContent();
    cb.saveState();
    cb.setColorStroke(new CMYKColor(1f, 0f, 0f, 0f));
    cb.setColorFill(new CMYKColor(1f, 0f, 0f, 0f));
    cb.rectangle(20,10,10,820);
    cb.fill();
    cb.restoreState();
}

Create an instance of your custom page event class, and declare it to the writer before opening the document:

writer.setPageEvent(myPageEventInstance);

Now your rectangle will be drawn on every page, on top of the existing content. If you want the rectangle under the existing content: replace getDirectContent() with getDirectContentUnder().