Automate PDF document generation in PHP, create print-ready PDF reports of any complexity with PHP SDK. This Cloud-based solution is built around templates, data sources and a powerful LINQ-syntax, giving PHP developers the flexibility to fit precise technical and business requirements.
Using this PHP library, you can programmatically build highly customized PDF reports on any operating system. Richly formatted PDF documents like contracts, orders, invoices, shipment reports, sales proposals, inventories can be assembled on the fly as a part of your PHP software.
The importance of Document Automation and Report Generation has grown immensely over the past decades. Almost every company has a need to generate documents and deliver them to partners or customers on time. Moreover, it is usually a decisive factor in financial success. Implementing such technologies can result in significant financial savings by reducing manual data entry, human error, proofreading and paperwork. For these reasons, document automation and reporting tools are an integral part of many modern software solutions that aim to provide advanced analytical features to users.
Generally speaking, PDF report generation is a process that combines text, data and graphics into a single entity and exports the result in a convenient visual form to PDF file format. For information on supported I/O formats, please visit our Documentation.
GroupDocs Assembly for PHP is a Cloud-based solution for generating PDF documents using templates and data sources. The document template acts as a base-frame, which, in addition to the standard content (text, tables, charts, etc.), includes special placeholder fields for inserting values from the data source. Not only individual values can be inserted, but also entire arrays of data in the form of tables and graphs.
The template also contains programming constructs - PDF document generation rules - that control data selection and condition processing. Binding data to a document template uses LINQ-expression syntax, which allows developers to process data in a generic way, regardless of the type of data source used. In this way, our PHP Cloud SDK gives you flexibility in PDF content generation and a powerful set of methods for data processing.
This product also supports Mail Merge functionality in case you want to create and send batches of personalized letters in PDF format to customers. You just need to insert Mail Merge fields to the document template and pass it to the Cloud API together with a data source.
Regardless of the scale and type of PDF document automation you are going to implement, there are three steps to build a report in PHP:
Designing templates is a difficult task. In addition to a clear understanding of the requirements for the final PDF document, analytical and programming skills are required. A good template design should reflect the customer's view on a particular issue. The most effective approach is to combine tabular data and graphics in the right balance, determined by business requirements.
As mentioned above, the template structure usually contains some fixed blocks of content (text, images, logos, etc.) mixed with special programming constructs that control PDF document assembly logic. These PDF document generation rules are defined with a special expression syntax, which enables developers to do the following:
You can learn more about template syntax in our Developer Guide.
GroupDocs Assembly for PHP does not require any external software or third-party tools to be installed. This is a Cloud-based solution for PDF, where all programming interactions are performed over the network using the REST API.
All GroupDocs products are fully compliant with industry security standards: data transfer is carried out using the SSL protocol, which eliminates the possibility of information being intercepted by third parties. To connect to GroupDocs Cloud Services, you need to use personal access keys. Please refer to the Quick Start guide.
The following code example shows how to generate PDF reports using PHP.
use GroupDocs\Assembly\AssemblyApi;
$assemblyApi = new AssemblyApi('####-####-####-####-####', '##################');
$fileName = "Input1.pdf";
$dataFile = "Input2.pdf";
$requestFileContent = $fileName;
$uploadDocumentRequest = new UploadFileRequest(
$requestFileContent, $fileName, NULL
);
$assemblyApi->uploadFile($uploadDocumentRequest);
$reportData = file_get_contents($dataFile);
$assembleData = new Model\AssembleOptions(
array("template_file_info"=>new Model\TemplateFileInfo(array("file_path"=> $fileName)),
"save_format"=>"pdf",
"report_data"=> $reportData));
$request = new Requests\AssembleDocumentRequest($assembleData);
$result = $assembly->assembleDocument($request);Install 'GroupDocs.Assembly Cloud SDK for PHP' from Packagist repository. Just run composer require groupdocscloud/groupdocs-assembly-cloud to install the SDK, then use require_once('vendor/autoload.php'); to import it into your project.
As an alternative, you can manually clone GroupDocs.Assembly Cloud SDK for PHP source code from GitHub. Please follow these Instructions to quickly get the necessary security credentials and access our REST API.
You can generate reports in other file formats: