PHP suitability for producing complex printed reports 3

[piquet]

Hi,

We currently use shell script and AWK on Linux-based systems to pull data from various large flat-file databases and then Excel VBA macros to basically cut and paste the data into complex report templates. The final output is printed or output as PDF. Excel provides us with a very professional look and the ability to include charting, images and text on the page. It also shrinks to fit when the data would otherwise overflow the page. It also formats numbers simply and effectively, and allows for changes to be implemented quickly.

It has been suggested that a better approach would be to use PHP for the output process instead of Excel, since this could all run on the Linux servers without intervention.

I would be very interested to hear professional opinions as to the suitability of PHP for this type of application. Is PHP well suited to producing complex printed output which has an equivalent quality to Excel? Is it the right horse for this particular course?

Thanks in advance.

Phil

 

[piquet]

Nope, Healthcare.

I guess Wingz was quite well marketed, and some people jumped at it. Great to here you made money out of it both times! Well done that man!

Phil

 

[skiflyer]

Just to add my two cents... using PHP to generate some .RTF files might do you very well here... and it's dead simple as compared to the PDF file creation (which isn't exactly difficult).

 

[nickroper]

Phil,

Healthcare huh, never got into that field

Yup, all I need to do now is convince them to convert all the Excel apps to PHP - which is kind of where this all started

I like the idea that you process the files locally with awk and then zip them up and email them - certainly saves bandwidth and, as you say, the report generation gets done on the client rather than over the network. Do different clients have different teplates, or just different data?

Let me know how you get on with the application.

Cheers

 

[piquet]

Morning Nick,

For some products, clients do have different templates as well as data. Here we simply store their variant in a site-specific templates area so it gets picked up automatically in place of the default one.

I've just put an example report page here to give anyone interested a better idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about. This is quite simple by comparison to some but at least is shows a mix of tabular and graphical data. I know there are charting libraries out there, but if I was using PHP to generate PDF output would I find myself drawing all the lines which make up the data grid manually?

Skiflyer - will investigate rtf - thanks.

Phil

 

[nickroper]

Hi Phil,

I'll take a look, but out in meetings most of the day, so might be tomorrow.

Interested in a scoreboard for your golf society? My other hat is as director of Speedtrack Ltd (logistic tracking & event scoring) - MySQL/PHP based of course! And you can update the scores from your mobile 'phone - give it a try for the demo event...

http://www.speedtrack.co.uk/users/demo/scoreboard/

I'd be interested in any feedback

(Please note, the java front-end for the courier demo needs upgrading for Netscape)

Cheers,

Nick

 

[ingresman]

Ah Informix, it's gone now sold to IBM