Keep a Row on One Page

By default Word will break a table row across a page boundary, leaving the top half of the text on one page and the rest on the next. SetCantSplit(true) on the row properties turns that off: the row moves to the next page whole rather than splitting. It is the inverse of the “Allow row to break across pages” checkbox in Word’s table properties, so setting it to true is what unchecking that box does.

Four settings in this area sound alike and do different things.

SetCantSplit is the one you want for a row whose cells hold a few lines each. SetKeepWithNext on the paragraphs in a row pulls the following content along with it, which is how you keep a label row attached to the row it describes. Neither prevents the table itself from breaking; they only control where the break is allowed to land.

Doing it

for i := 0; i < 25; i++ {
    row := table.AddRow()
    row.Properties().SetCantSplit(true)

    para := row.AddCell().AddParagraph()
    para.Properties().SetKeepWithNext(true)
    para.AddRun().AddText(fmt.Sprintf("Row No. %d", i+1))
}

Set the property per row as you build. There is no table-level switch that applies it to every row, so a loop that adds rows has to call it inside the loop. SetCantSplit(false) does not just turn the flag off, it clears the row’s property list entirely.

Limitations

SetCantSplit, SetHeight and SetTblHeader all replace the row’s property list rather than adding to it, so only the last of them called takes effect. Calling SetHeight and then SetCantSplit on the same row silently drops the height, and calling them the other way around drops the unsplittable flag. Until that changes, a row can carry exactly one of the three.

A row that does not fit in the space left on the page moves to the next page whole. A row taller than a whole page has nowhere to move to, and both Word and UniOffice’s own PDF conversion truncate it rather than split it, so the content past the bottom of the page is lost. SetCantSplit suits rows a few lines tall. On a row whose cells hold a page or more of text, leaving the default in place is the safer choice. Setting wml.ST_HeightRuleExact on a row height has the same truncating effect for the same reason.

The flag is a layout instruction stored in the file, so nothing about it shows until something paginates the document. Converting to PDF with document/convert honors it.

Run the example

The example writes several paragraphs of filler text, then builds a 25 row table where every row is marked unsplittable and every cell paragraph is marked keep with next, so the table crosses a page boundary with the rows intact. It ships with table-row-cant-split.docx, the expected output, for comparison.

git clone https://github.com/unidoc/unioffice-examples.git
cd unioffice-examples/document/table-row-cant-split
go run main.go

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