PHP - Dompdf and PHPMailer unexpected behavior - php

Question

I am working on a web application using PHP as a server-side and a jQuery framework as a client-side.
One of the scenarios of the application is to send an email with pdf file attached I am doing this using PHPMailer and Dompdf libraries.
I had created a function named sendMail in a file name send.php accept 4 params (receiver email,subject,data,email number) the last param is because I have 5 different emails may be sent depending on the situation and data param is the data will be rendered in the html email body.
The problem is when I call the function from send.php it work as expected the email sent and pdf file created and attached to the email .
but when I require send.php in any other file and call sendMail function I get the email only without any pdf file and the file not even generated or saved on the server.
send.php
<?php
require_once 'dompdf/autoload.inc.php';
// reference the Dompdf namespace
use Dompdf\Dompdf;
require 'PHPMailerAutoload.php';
$body = "test message";
sendMail('peter#w34.co','MLS mail',$body,5);
function sendMail($email,$subject,$body,$index){
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP
$mail->SMTPDebug = 1; // debugging: 1 = errors and messages, 2 = messages only
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // SMTP authentication
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls'; // secure transfer enabled REQUIRED for GMail
$mail->Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; // SMTP server
$mail->Port = 587; // SMTP Port
$mail->Username = "peterwilson.intake34#gmail.com"; // SMTP account username
$mail->Password = "Password"; // SMTP account password // TCP port to connect to
$mail->From = 'peter#example.com';
$mail->FromName = 'Wilson';
$mail->addAddress($email); // Add a recipient
$mail->isHTML(true); // Set email format to HTML
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->Body=$body;
// instantiate and use the dompdf class
$dompdf = new Dompdf();
$dompdf->loadHtml($body);
// Render the HTML as PDF
$dompdf->render();
$output = $dompdf->output();
$file_to_save= "../work-orderes/file.pdf";
file_put_contents($file_to_save, $output);
$mail->addAttachment('../work-orderes/file.pdf');
if(!$mail->send()) {
// echo $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
return 1;
}
}
?>
save.php
<?php
require("sendSmtp/send.php");
session_start();
$body = "Hello World!";
sendMail('peter#w34.co','MLS mail',$body,5);
?>
Any suggestions about why Dompdf not works when calling it from any other file ??
What I have tried
removing dompdf and reinstall the latest stable version from
here
cleaning all code and just leave sendMail function and calling it
try to write the code from the beginnig

Answer 1

I solved it finally!
after debugging I found that everything going fine till $output = $dompdf->output(); after that I get an error on save the file using $file_to_save= "../work-orderes/file.pdf";
this work properly when I call the function sendMail() from send.php but when I call it from another file I get an error regarding accessing the path.
The Answer here that I should use the absolute path not the relative one like below
$file_to_save= $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."\work-orderes/file.pdf";
now the file saved successfully and attached to the email like expected!