PRINTABLE tables - PHP & MySQL

philerb

This may be something that's not possible, it may be possible but not feasible, or it may be so simple that I've completely overlooked something.

Here's the current scenario - I have several related tables in a MySQL database. I have written a (very basic) PHP/HTML front end that pulls various related information together and displays a large (okay, medium) table of information, with column headers, etc.

The problem now is that our clients would like to be able to print out these tables and have them come out with the table headers at the top of each page, etc. If we were talking about a Word or Excel document, that would be simple. But in a webpage?

My first thought was to have the headers repeat after every so many rows (ie. after every 20 rows), but there is a distinct possibility of any given row being taller than expected, thus pushing the next rows down further than expected and eventually offsetting the headers on subsequent pages.

Any ideas here? Or a point in the right direction?

gardnc

In simple terms we have accomplished it by using frames for headers and body and CSS. Was very complicated and still breaks often. We did it in ASP but it would apply just as well to PHP.

The HTML model was never designed to be a happy print companion and I would not wish the nightmare of our code on anyone.

Hopefully someone else can answer this for you and I'll learn from them.

philerb

Thanks for the post!

On another forum, I received a reply with information about some PHP functions that allow you to output to PDF and supposedly these functions allow the repeating of headers/footers, etc. on each page.

For everyone's benefit, if I get it working, I will post here with the code and an example... I forsee this being very useful IF it does work... consistently.