PHP and Word

[Balboa1]

Hi,
I'm trying to access Word using PHP with a view to creating merge documents in Word from data from a MySQL database. I'm new to PHP and am trying to get the following code to work as a starting point.

<?php
$objWord = new COM("Word.Application");
if (!$objWord)
{
echo 'Failed to create object';
exit;
}
$objWord->Visible = 0;
$objWord->Documents->Add();
$objWord->Selection->TypeText("Hello world!");
$objWord->Documents[1]->SaveAs("C:\helloworld.doc");
$objWord->Documents[1]->Close(false);
$objWord->Quit();
$objWord = null;
unset($objWord);
?>

All that seems to happen when I access it from a browser is that the winword.exe starts and runs for about 60 seconds then terminates. No document is created. I've tried different derivatives of this and have changed Visible to 1 but it makes no difference. I've also tried adding echo "Finished"; at the end to see if it comes up in the browser but it doesn't.

the com / d-com setting in php.ini is set to True.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Balboa

[big_nerd]

Balboa,

I don't do much with COM Objects, but there is a class available Here, if nothing else, perhaps you can see something in there?

[MarkR]

Unfortunately, MSWord is not intended for usage in server side applications and is not generally robust enough for production usage.

Even if you can make it do what you want, it is pretty much guaranteed to crash your server sooner or later, when there are 100 copies of winword.exe all hogging the memory.

Do not use winword.exe as as server-side component - it simply doesn't cut it. Consider one of the many commercial alternatives which are designed for such use. Or output something in a standard format that doesn't require one.

Mark