Chapter 13. Reporting
In
many web database applications, you'll want to
produce printable paper reports. For example, you might want to
produce a stock report from an online store, a customer receipt, a
printable version of an HTML page, or a fill-in form to be faxed.
Unfortunately, this isn't easy: PHP
doesn't have great built-in tools for reporting that
are portable across all platforms. Because of this, reporting is one
of the more difficult tasks in PHP.
This chapter shows you how to produce reports using PHP. We show you
how to use R&OS Ltd.'s excellent pdf-php library
to produce PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) files that can be
downloaded, saved, and printed by your users. PDF is now the most
common format for providing reports on the Web, and the pdf-php
library allows you to produce complex, configurable reports, and to
include graphics and images. It's similar to a PEAR
package, and we include a detailed discussion of almost all of its
methods.
We don't discuss other reporting schemes for PHP,
but we do discuss how to find out more about them in the next
section.
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