PHP Graphs and Reports

[Anon]

Does anyone know if there is a way in PHP to dynamically from database create graphical reports, such as pies, bars, etc...

Thanks
Igor

[Anon]

Yes.

I do it on one of my sites, but unfortunately the reports are behind a password. Sorry.

I'm using ykcee as the graphing package for bar charts. You can find ykcee at sourceforge.net. The version there uses the GD library and truetype fonts to produce png or jpg images. I've modified it to work with an older version of GD to produce gif images.

Basically, I provide ykcee with the values pulled from the database. In my case, I have to save the resulting image to disk. I give it a unique file name using something like $imagename = md5(time()).".gif". PHP is used to put this filename into the img tag (i.e. <img src=$imagename>). A crontab deletes the extra images once they have been served.

Hope that helps. If you want me to elaborate since the above is very sketchy, please let me know.

Rob

[Anon]

I should have elaborated a bit more. If you end up saving the GD-produced graph to disk, you have to give each image a unique name so that two people hitting the site simultaneously don't see each other's graphs. Looking at my code, I use

$graph_name = "img_".md5(uniqid(rand())).".gif";

to do this (above I said something about md5(time())).

Rob