Can this be done?

AlieN8

Hi! N00b here...

I had an idea for something and I was wondering if this is even possible.

What I would like to do is have a standard form on a website where people will submit their name, another persons name, and a comment and have that file output to a premade word document where it will just insert those values into the specified fields. I guess then too the issue arises of where all of these files will be stored and how to access them. That can be looked into aftewards. I was just curious if this was even possible.

Thanks!

Huuggee

of course it can.

what you can do is make your template document, and put place holders (eg <<<NAME>>>) within the document that you want to fill in.
the use the function str_replace() to search and replace within the document.

As far as word is concerned, that can create a platform limitation for some people. a better idea maybe an rtf document.
This may also depend on the document layout ad how rich you wish it to be etc. Another idea may be to create a pdf document, as PHP has extension (pdflib) to do this for you, and there are other various classes around on the net to do the same.

so the answer is yes.

id10t

Easy to do with FDF/PDF forms, which eliminates the cross platform problem, but does force people to have a reader.

Drakla

I've used this to generate invoice rtfs on a website using {TAGNAME} as the replacement value. Somtimes using string replace doesn't work, but it's just due to your tag being broken internally in the document over two lines, so just strip out all the breaks first like this...

$rtf = file_get_contents('customer-invoice.rtf');

// beautifully lazy system of knocking rtf's break a word up over multiple lines
$rtf = str_replace("\r\n", '', $rtf);	// lines are broken /r/n on windows

foreach ($row as $tag => $value)
	$rtf = str_replace('\{'.$tag.'\}', $value, $rtf);

header('Content-type: application/rtf');

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=invoice-$row[clickid].rtf");
header('Pragma: no-cache');
header('Expires: 0');

echo $rtf;

exit;

I couldn't get it to work at all with word doc's, but did give it a go, but Word just wouldn't have it.

stringman

I have never done it, but here is a link to how to create dynamic PDFs using PHP.

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PDF-Generation-With-PHP/

Ken