Posted by Steve Brown on 04/23/05 17:43

> My plan is move away from the current solution but I am still confused
> of how am I going to get control of the layout of the report.
> Generate a PDF ? Use CSS ?
>
> Some of the "trick" parts are, for instance, to have the same header
> in all pages of the same report, if I have tabular data greater than
> the height of the page continue in the next page etc.

I used to encounter the same problems with reporting in our business
software. You can generate reports and spit out HTML in a new window
and have the user print the report from the browser, but that has many
drawbacks. It only works with simple data sets, its difficult (or
impossible) to control page breaks, lack of precision placing, etc.

Now I use FPDF to generate PDF reports (http://www.fpdf.org/). Its
free, easy to use, and pretty flexible. It allows you to do precision
placement on a page, add headers, footers, etc, etc, etc. Be sure to
check out the "Scripts" section, its got a bunch of useful tips for
expanding functionality of the classes. There is another commerical
product out there (can't thin of the name right now) that is supposed
to be faster, but FPDF is pretty fast in our applications.

I also use the JPGraph package for generating graphs
(http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/). This is *really* slick. Its free
for personal use, about $125 for commercial use. You need to install
some additional PHP libraries (JPEG, PNG, GD at least), but its fast
and easy. I love playing around with this product because the
possibilities for what you can do are almost endless.

HTH,
Steve

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