Generating nice reports

[pnoeric]

Hey all -- any good solutions for making really sharp reports from PHP? I can do the whole open-a-new-browser-window-and-draw-it-in-there but there's still not as much control over the final output as I'd like.

I was toying with drawing PDFs on the fly but seems like that MIGHT be overkill.

Any thoughts?

best
Eric

[Anon]

I wouldn't recommend generating PDFs because like you said, it will take a lot of time to generate the templates.

BUT: You can create HTML templates and have PHP parse it and insert the data. One good template parser I know of is called fasttemplates or something like that.

What kind of reports do you want to generate? If you want to generate graphs, use the GD library (as outlined by some articles here at phpBuilder).

-sridhar

[pnoeric]

hi Sridhar, thanks; yeah I'm using Smarty templates for that-- I guess I want to have more control over the output than relying on the browser font size, and the browser putting the date and time stamp on the bottom of each page by default, etc.

Def. will be doing some graphics, using GD or similar. Thanks :-)

best
Eric