Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

[Dave Smithz]

Hi there,

A client of mine wants to start generating some reports from their PHP /
MYSQL database.

They were previously gathering data from the screen and cutting and pasting
it into a Word document template. They now just want to generate it.

My initial thoughts are to just format the information in a table and then
they print it out. But due to the dynamic nature of the reports and what is
included, there might be issues with regard to the width fitting on a piece
of paper, and the general format will not look as good as a Word document
would.

What ways could I approach this problem? Is there anything available which
would make report formatting attractive and easy?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards

Dave

[NC]

Re: Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

Dave Smithz wrote:[color=blue]
>
> A client of mine wants to start generating some reports from their PHP /
> MYSQL database.
>
> They were previously gathering data from the screen and cutting and pasting
> it into a Word document template. They now just want to generate it.
>
> My initial thoughts are to just format the information in a table and then
> they print it out. But due to the dynamic nature of the reports and what is
> included, there might be issues with regard to the width fitting on a piece
> of paper, and the general format will not look as good as a Word document
> would.
>
> What ways could I approach this problem? Is there anything available which
> would make report formatting attractive and easy?[/color]

You can generate reports in either PDF or RTF.

The exact approach to generating PDF would depend on what PDF
generation tool(s) you use. There are at least two PDF generation
extensions bundled with PHP; there are also "pure PHP" tools such as
FPDF that are somewhat slower, but do not require any particular PHP
extension to be available (helpful for hosted applications).

If you want to use RTF (which is readable by most word processors)
instead, take a look here:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.php/msg/fc914bd0d0a120fc

This is my old post to alt.php where I show how to build a simple
"report" (actually, a set of mailing labels) without having to learn a
lot about RTF.

Cheers,
NC

[Colin McKinnon]

Re: Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

Dave Smithz wrote:

<snip>[color=blue]
>
> My initial thoughts are to just format the information in a table and then
> they print it out. But due to the dynamic nature of the reports and what
> is included, there might be issues with regard to the width fitting on a
> piece of paper, and the general format will not look as good as a Word
> document would.
>[/color]

Three letters: CSS
[color=blue]
> What ways could I approach this problem? Is there anything available which
> would make report formatting attractive and easy?
>[/color]

You could do all sorts of things to make it look fancy in print.....but why?
Yes, we all know people for whom an Email isn't real unless its in black
and white on A4 - even if its spam. But choosing this as your starting
point reinforces this kind of behaviour instead of solving it.

PDF is better, but instead of dead tree - it's dead data. An HTML table
(yes, I do mean table - I know you can create fancy layouts with CSS and
don't need tables to do it but....) can be imported back into a
spreadshseet or a PHP array.

Don't kill your data - give it a nice new home!

C.

[Chung Leong]

Re: Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

Dave Smithz wrote:[color=blue]
> My initial thoughts are to just format the information in a table and then
> they print it out. But due to the dynamic nature of the reports and what is
> included, there might be issues with regard to the width fitting on a piece
> of paper, and the general format will not look as good as a Word document
> would.[/color]

Try using point sizes to specify the dimensions of the table cells. A
point is 1/72 of an inch. If you specify the width of a table to be
468pt, then in theory, the browser would print it out at exactly 6.5
inches. CSS gives you a lot of control over the appearance, but there's
no guarantee of WYSIWYG.

[Dave Smithz]

Re: Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

Thanks for the comments. I have been reading more and at first I thought the
RTF file generation would be perfect.

The reason why CSS is not suitable is because I need to generate these
reports into a format that is sent back to clients. They need them in a
particualr format and I could not really mess around with CSS trying to get
it write. Plus they want to be sent a file via email or hard copy so RTF or
PDF would be easier.

On reading up I thought RTF would be great because of the dynamic nature of
the required reports. I could create an RTF document template with a table
in it. Look how a new table row is created. And for each table row I want to
add to the report, just add the necessary RTF commands and fill it with
data.

However looking at an RTF document in raw text and working out how to add a
new table line with data does not seem stright forward. I do not really
fancy spending a lot of time learning about RTF.
I did try and save Word document in XML format. This might be easier to
figure out how to add new lines to a table and populate the table with
report data. I can assume my clients are using Word 2003 so they would be
able to read these document (worse case I could print them out as PDF before
sending).

I think I am going the right way about this but any other suggestions or
ways to make adding a line to the XML or RTF would be welcome.

Kind regards

Dave

[Dave Smithz]

Re: Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

Hmmm,
Even playing around with the XML strucutre although I managed to create
another row by editing the raw text, when I think about it, I Also have
dynamic anount of columns in the report depedning on what is needed to be
generated. Having to learn and create functions that handle the dynamic
generation of the correct XML (therefore the correct amount of columns and
the amount of rows) might make things a bit tricky.

Opoen to other easier ways of approaching this. Maybe for now it will just
be printer HTML tables but I just do not think my clients will be happy with
this.

Kind regards

Dave

[HappyHourHotSpots.com]

Re: Report writing in PHP - what tools for making formating nice?

Can you just make a file in Word and then just export the data to a
file that Word will read? Kind of like when you are doing envelopes
and labels setup? This way you can layout the whole thing the way you
have been in word and the text document will import the exported file
and look exactly how it has in the past...

Just a suggestion.

-Rick

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