Issue #120: Add support for setting hyperlink URL on a Cell

[lambart]

Just contributing back some changes made for my employer. I see this has also been requested as issue #120.

Call Cell.setUrl() to add a URI to your Cell; it will be rendered and clickable in the enclosing Table.

[JamJar00]

Would love to see this get merged! Would be a great bit of functionality to have available so we can remove long links from our PDFs

[vivaca77]

hi lambart, can you please give an example how to use it, I see your implementation is used as createImageCell, not sure if is possible using it as regular cell and just using text?

[johnmanko]

@lambart / @JamJar00

Can you give me a little background on this? Is a cell URI a standard feature of PDFBox?

[JamJar00]

I'm not sure I understand the question, it's not a 'standard' feature because PDFBox doesn't natively support tables. That's why we use boxable 🙂

This is a quality of life change. IIRC currently you need to have the full link text in the cell (which then automatically hyperlinks in most readers) where as this would allow you to have some 'click here' text that takes you somewhere when you click the cell.

[theeogflip]

We need this, its actual not possible to add a hyperlink to a Cell

[johnmanko]

I'll take a look at this PR this weekend. Hopefully we can get it merged and put out a new release.

[johnmanko]

@JamJar00 Do you have a test you can include with this?

[theeogflip]

Test is here: #262

[lambart]

hi lambart, can you please give an example how to use it, I see your implementation is used as createImageCell, not sure if is possible using it as regular cell and just using text?

Hi vivica77, sorry for the slow response!

For our purposes, we have only used it in an ImageCell; I haven't tried it in a TableCell but it might work.

We just do something like this...

imageCell.setUrl(new URL("https://example.com"));

I'm happy to see this getting some traction, and that some people find it useful.

[lambart]

@lambart / @JamJar00

Can you give me a little background on this? Is a cell URI a standard feature of PDFBox?

Hi John,
PFBox has various classes which extend PDAction, with support for form manipulation, navigation etc. We're just using one of those, a PDActionURI, to make PDFBox provide a navigable hyperlink for any arbitrary URL.