How to generate a report with dynamic header in PDF using itextsharp?

I'm generating a PDF report with iTextSharp, the header of the report has the information of the customer. In the body of the report contains a list of customer transactions. My doubt is: How to generate a header dynamically for each client?

I need an example to generate a header dynamically to the report. Every new page Header need to have the data that client when changing client header should contain information on the new client.

Posted on StackOverflow on Feb 7, 2014 by user3154466

I've written a small example in Java which you can easily adapt to C# as iText and iTextSharp share more or less the same syntax.

The example is called VariableHeader and these are the most interesting snippets:

First I create a custom implementation of the PdfPageEvent interface (using PdfPageEventHelper). It's important to understand that you can't use the onStartPage() method, use the onEndPage() method instead.

public class Header extends PdfPageEventHelper {

    protected Phrase header;

    public void setHeader(Phrase header) {
        this.header = header;
    }

    @Override
    public void onEndPage(PdfWriter writer, Document document) {
        PdfContentByte canvas = writer.getDirectContentUnder();
        ColumnText.showTextAligned(
            canvas, Element.ALIGN_RIGHT, header, 559, 806, 0);
    }
}

As you can see, the text of the header is stored in a variable that can be changed using the setHeader() method we created.

The event is declared to the PdfWriter like this:

PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream(filename));
Header event = new Header();
writer.setPageEvent(event);

I change the header Phrase before invoking the newPage() method:

event.setHeader(new Phrase(String.format("THE FACTORS OF %s", i)));
document.newPage();

In my simple example, I generate a document that lists the factors of all the numbers from 2 to 300: variable_header.pdf. The header of each page says "THE FACTORS OF X" where X is the number of which the factors are shown on that page.

You can easily adapt this to show different customer names instead of numbers.

Click this link if you want to see how to answer this question in iText 7.