I'm working on a dynamic report right now that pulls information from a database and (obviously) puts it into a report. Right now I'm using PHP to write this report and I already 90% of the coding completed. My problem comes with the output format. Right now it is using HTML as the output, using vhgraph to create pngs for the graphs and just normal HTML tables to display data.
I'm OK with HTML except for a few things. The report doesn't look that professional, but it still looks better than crystal reports so I'm fine with that. The problem is with how much extra work has to be done.
Right now I am having to save the html report and open it in WORD. Then I do some extra formatting like add headers, footers, and page numbers. Then I have to go through and find where I want page breaks and add them. Then I can save the finished report and print it. The big deal is with the page breaks. Does anyone know of a format in which I can do smart page breaking, so that it doesnt start a table and then end the table on the next page?
PDF is something I've looked into a little, since php can write directly to a PDF. I'm a little afraid of it though because it is so tedious. I have to give specific coordinates for every text block and I have to tell it when to start and end a page. Thats a big deal because, with a dynamic report, you never know if something might be a little too big for a page. Also, I have yet to figure out how to do HTML-like tables in PDF.
Does anyone know of anything that might be a little better for what I'm doing? Or maybe I'm wrong about PDF and should give that a try?
