# Create Music Bingo Cards with iText > This weekend we had a party and wanted to organize a music bingo. A small Java project seemed to be the best solution! - URL: https://foojay.io/today/create-music-bingo-cards-with-itext/ - Published: 2022-06-09 - Authors: Frank Delporte - Categories: Library - Originally published at: https://webtechie.be/post/2022-05-30-pdf-bingo-card-with-itext/ > Let's use Java to automate a boring task and have a party! > Warning, this can lead to noise nuisance from singing and dancing... It has been a while since I last had to create documents in a program, and iText has been "on my radar" to try out for a while now. This weekend we had a party and wanted to organize a music bingo. For this, we needed a set of randomly selected songs to be printed out per person. A small Java project seemed to be the best solution, otherwise, this would have been a boring, manual, and repetitive task. Isn't that the goal of most of our developments? **"Automate the boring stuff!"** ### About iText iText is a library for creating and manipulating PDF files in Java and .NET, originally written by Bruno Lowagie. The history of the project and [the company that grew out of it](https://itextpdf.com/en) is described in the book ["Entreprenerd"](https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/). This book explains what you can expect when starting a company to generate the resources that are necessary to further develop and maintain your technology. iText is available under open source (AGPL) as well as a commercial license. As Bruno is Belgian and the company still has a solid base in Belgium, I have to admit there is also some patriotism involved here. ### Goal of the project We asked our guests to give us their two favorite songs. We added some extra "party songs" and ended up with a list of over 70 songs in a playlist on Spotify. Each player gets a print-out with 16 songs, of course, this value can be configured in the code. Each print-out has the name of the player and contains the songs selected by the player. The card is filled with other random songs, so each player has a different card. {{< gallery >}} vik-411x510.png | | PDF Bingo Card frank-414x510.png | | PDF Bingo card {{< /gallery >}} First goal of the game was to have a full horizontal line, and after we had three winners of those, we switched to having a full Bingo card. Some of the songs were only played for 10-15 seconds, others needed more time as some dancing and singing got involved. For that last part, I want to apologize to our neighbors... ### Exporting from Spotify A playlist can't be exported from Spotify itself. There is a "Spotify Web API" that can be used for this (see [the Spotify Developer documentation](https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/libraries/)). I've taken a shortcut here and used [Exportify](https://github.com/watsonbox/exportify) which actually is built on top of that API. It shows you all your playlists and those can be exported with one click of a button to CSV. ![Exportify](exportify-1024x312.png) The exported file contains a lot of info, but we only need three columns for the Bingo cards, so open the file in a spreadsheet editor, remove the unneeded columns and add one with the name of the person that has selected the song, so you end up with: * Song title * Artist * Name of the person that chose the song (can be empty) For example: ``` The Greatest Show,Hugh Jackman - The Greatest Showman Ensemble,Vik Rode rozen in de sneeuw,Marva,Omer Macarena,Los Del Rio, ``` ### Source code The final project is a very simple Java Maven program and the sources are available on [Github](https://github.com/FDelporte/SpotifyBingoCardGenerator). #### Data model As this project is based on Java 17, we can use Records for the imported songs ``` public record ImportedSong (String title, String artist, String selectedBy) { } ``` and the generated Bingo card per person with a list of songs ``` import java.util.List; public record BingoCard(String forName, List songs) { } ``` #### Reading the CSV file The list of songs is read line by line from the CSV file with a FileReader ``` public static List loadFromFile(String fileName) { ... try { File f = new File(resource.getFile()); try (BufferedReader b = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f, StandardCharsets.UTF_8))) { String line; while ((line = b.readLine()) != null) { var song = processLine(line); if (song != null) { list.add(song); } } } } catch (Exception ex) { logger.error("Error while importing song list: {}", ex.getMessage()); } return list; } private static ImportedSong processLine(String data) { if (data == null || data.isEmpty()) { logger.warn("Data is empty"); return null; } String[] csvLine = data.split(","); return new ImportedSong(csvLine[0], csvLine[1], csvLine.length >= 3 ? csvLine[2] : ""); } ``` #### Generate a random card for every user The cards are generated by * Getting a list of names of the players (distinct values from column 3 of the CSV) * For each person generate a list of 16 songs * First, the ones selected by the person * Add a random song that is not part of the list yet, until 16 is reached * Randomize the order of the list with `Collections.shuffle(songsForPerson);` #### **C**reating the PDF As the last step, for each user, a PDF page is generated. By using iText and the example code I found in \this post by Lars Vogel\, this was a very quick and easy step. The dependency is added to the pom.xml file with ``` com.itextpdf itextpdf ${itext.version} ``` And the actual code is very easy to read and understand: ``` public static void createPdfWithBingoCards(List cards) { try { var desktop = System.getProperty("user.home") + "/Desktop"; var pdfFile = Paths.get(desktop, "bingo_" + System.currentTimeMillis() + ".pdf").toFile(); Document document = new Document(); PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream(pdfFile)); document.open(); for (BingoCard card : cards) { addBingoCard(document, card); } document.close(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } private static void addBingoCard(Document document, BingoCard bingoCard) throws DocumentException { // Start a new page document.newPage(); Paragraph paragraph = new Paragraph(); paragraph.setAlignment(Element.ALIGN_CENTER); // We add one empty line addEmptyLine(paragraph, 1); // Name of the person for this card var personName =new Paragraph(bingoCard.forName(), FONT_TITLE); personName.setAlignment(Element.ALIGN_CENTER); paragraph.add(personName); // We add two empty lines addEmptyLine(paragraph, 2); // Add a table with the songs PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(NUMBER_OF_COLUMNS); for (ImportedSong song : bingoCard.songs()) { PdfPCell tableCell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase(song.title() + System.lineSeparator() + System.lineSeparator() + song.artist() + System.lineSeparator() + System.lineSeparator() + (song.selectedBy().equals(bingoCard.forName()) ? "" : song.selectedBy()), FONT_SMALL)); tableCell.setHorizontalAlignment(Element.ALIGN_CENTER); tableCell.setVerticalAlignment(Element.ALIGN_TOP); tableCell.setMinimumHeight(120); if (song.selectedBy().equals(bingoCard.forName())) { tableCell.setBackgroundColor(BaseColor.LIGHT_GRAY); } table.addCell(tableCell); } paragraph.add(table); // Add paragraph to document document.add(paragraph); } private static void addEmptyLine(Paragraph paragraph, int number) { for (int i = 0; i < number; i++) { paragraph.add(new Paragraph(" ")); } } ``` ### Conclusion Is this production-ready code? No, of course not, there are no unit tests 😉 But it proves iText is very easy to understand and the open-source version allows you to quickly create a PDF with a custom layout. With the `PdfPTable` method, you can create a very basic grid layout with any text information you want to include in your document.