Can't download PDF (FPDF) from PHP function - php

I am working on a PHP MVC application right now and I am having some troubles with FPDF. The code is pretty simple, but it won't download the PDF file (Also tried to open it and it doesn't work). I think I am missing something or maybe I need to disable something from the fpdf instance, but I can't reach the problem to solve it. Here's the code:
public function downloadPDF(){
require('../FPDF/fpdf.php');
$pdf = new FPDF();
$numero = cal_days_in_month(CAL_GREGORIAN,8,2003);
date_default_timezone_set("Atlantic/Canary");
setlocale(LC_ALL,"es_ES");
$pdf->SetFont("Arial","",14);
$pdf->AddPage();
$mifecha = gmmktime(0,0,0,2,1,2013);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,strtoupper(strftime("%B",$mifecha)),1);
$pdf->Ln();
$pdf->SetFont("Arial","",10);
$pdf->Cell(60,10,"By Ricky",0,1,"C");
$pdf->Output($pdf,"D");
}
Just in case: the idea is that using this function will automatically download the PDF file. For example, when clicking a "Download PDF" button in my menu.

It's almost a problem of header() somewhere into your MVC:
header("Content-type:application/pdf");
header("Content-Disposition:attachment;filename='downloaded.pdf'");
if you set correctly those, you should be alright.
Remember that header() must be called before any input or it won't work

OK, it was such an obvious mistake I didn't notice. I was using this:
$pdf->Output($pdf,"D");
FPDF's Output function receives two string parameters (name, output type). Instead of giving this function a name string, I was giving it the $pdf object instead. It worked perfectly when I fixed it, it ended up like this:
$pdf->Output("PDF name","I");
By the way, thanks for your support.

Related

Phpmailer add PDF attachment from a link

I'm using PHPMailer to send automatic email (obviously using PHP as programming language).
I would like to add a PDF attachment generated with TCPdf.
Unfortunately I cannot generate the PDF inside the php page where I'm using PHPMailer, and I cannot create a function that generate it.
I can only use a link to generate it, like this:
www.mypage.com/app-pdf/link_generate_pdf.php?IDToGenerate=131&PDFOutput=I
I was thinking that I can recall the page with the PDFOutput=S and "return" in some way the text of the PDF and add it as attachment.
Otherwise I can call the page with PDFOutput=F and save it to a temp folder and then attach it to the email.
The problem is that I don't know how to "call" a page as it were a function and return what the recalling page actually returns.
Do you have some suggestion?
Thank you
edit: I now understand the problem! The problem is that the URL is accessible only from autentication (login page). I thought that as I was logged in, the script was automatically capable of read the page. How can I solve this?
Use this to save the file on the server first and then attach
file_put_contents("Tmpfile.pdf", fopen("http://example.com/file.pdf", 'r'));
Attach as
$mail->AddAttachment('path_to_pdf/Tmpfile.pdf', $name = 'Name_of_pdf_file',
$encoding = 'base64', $type = 'application/pdf');
Hope this helps
Edit: Try this. works fine over here
file_put_contents("path_to_pdf/Tmpfile.pdf",
file_get_contents("http://example.com/file.pdf"));

Output buffering alternative php

I'm trying to save the content of a file into a PDF using html2pdf, but the file has some PHP codes which need to be processed. I made some research and I found out that I had to use output buffering so that the PHP content in the file can be processed. So I did something like:
<?php
require_once('html2pdf.class.php');
ob_start();
require_once('my_file.php');
$content = ob_get_clean();
// force download of $content to a PDF
$html2pdf = new HTML2PDF('P','A3','fr', false, 'ISO-8859-1');
$html2pdf->writeHTML($content);
$html2pdf->Output('file_name.pdf', 'D');
?>
The file my_file.php is the file that has some PHP code and the HTML content that I wanna save to a PDF, and the variable $content is the actual content with the PHP codes processed and everything. This works fine on Apache, but not on IIS.
Does anybody know an alternative way to make this work witout using ouput buffering? I tried file_get_contents('my_file.php'); but my php contents in my_file.php do not get processed when I do so.
Please, I'm looking for ways to do this without output buffering so that it can work on any server. I'm not looking for answers telling me to change my IIS server configuration or to use something else other than html2pdf.
Thanks in advance for any help
If you can modify the contents of my_file.php, you can put all the text into a variable there instead of outputting it directly.
You can use PHP/PDF Library http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php
And follow this example : http://php.net/manual/en/pdf.examples-basic.php
Hope that helps :)
The easiest approach would be to edit my_file.php so that rather than containing HTML it assigns the HTML content to a PHP variable. Then all you need to do is echo the variable.
//other PHP processing goes here, or anywhere else.
$someVar = "hello world";
$myHTML = "<html>My output: $someVar </html>";
echo $myHTML;
It's an ugly way of handling HTML output, and I'm not saying it's good programming, but if you want to avoid editing config files it would be quick and easy.

PDF created with FPDF cannot be opened by Adobe Reader

My PDF file cannot be opened with Adobe Reader. What's weird is that the PDF used to work in Adobe Reader just a few days ago and now it does not work, and of course I didn't modify the code otherwise it would be easy to fix.
I validated my PDF and learned it was a PDF/A-3, could be that it is not a PDF/A-1? If so why did it work for a time and suddenly stopped working?
EDIT
The problem was that somehow, some HTML code was output inside the PDF file, thus making the PDF file invalid for Adobe Reader, but not for Firefox, making all this much more confusing than it should be.
So a tip to anyway having trouble with PDF, open it with a text editor such as Notepad++ for Windows or GEdit for Linux, and compare with another PDF file which works fine. You should find the problem pretty quickly.
I read a lot of questions about this and I understood that the problem is happening with:
ob_start();
Without this line, my FPDF was not working with the message explained that there was another buffer first.
With this line, the PDF was readable only with Browser.
I changed this line to:
ob_clean();
and now I can open PDF with any reader.
This was happening to me, too. It did work in Firefox for me, but not in Chrome and it wouldn't open in Adobe.
The problem was that I was trying to run the script in a function and calling the function from a button. I fixed it simply by adding the script to it's own PHP file, and then linking to the php file directly.
Note: I did try ob_start() (and alternatively ob_clean() as noted in the other answer) and ob_end_flush(), but it didn't make a difference in the function. When it's in its own file it doesn't need it anyway.
// file.php
<?php
require $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/wp-content/plugins/eri-webtools-plugin/libraries/fpdf/fpdf.php'; // <-- File path for WordPress plugin
$pdf = new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output(); // To Download, use $pdf->Output('D', 'test.pdf', true);
?>
// html
View PDF

Generate PDF from HTML/CSS/PHP in Symfony 1.4

I am working on a Symfony 1.4 project. I need to make a PDF download link for a (yet to be) generated voucher and I have to say, I am a bit confused. I already have the HTML/CSS for the voucher, I created the download button in the right view, but I don't know where to go from there.
Use Mpdf to create the pdf file
http://www.mpdf1.com/
+1 with wkhtmltopdf
I'd even recommand the snappy library.
If you use composer, you can even get the wkhtmltopdf binaries automatically
Having used wkhtmltopdf for a while I've moved off it as 1) it has some serious bugs and 2) ongoing development has slowed down. I moved over to PhantomJS which is proving to be much better in terms of functionality and effectiveness.
Once you've got something like wkhtmltopdf or PhantomJS on your machine you need to generate the HTML page and pass that along to it. I'll give you an example assuming you use PhantomJS.
Initially set what every request parameters you need to for the template.
$this->getRequest->setParamater([some parameter],[some value]);
Then call the function getPresentation() to generate the HTML from a template. This will return the resulting HTML for a specific module and action.
$html = sfContext::getInstance()->getController()->getPresentation([module],[action]);
You'll need to replace the relative CSS paths with a absolute CSS path in the HTML file. For example by running preg_replace.
$html_replaced = preg_replace('/"\/css/','"'.sfConfig('sf_web_dir').'/css',$html);
Now write the HTML page to file and convert to a PDF.
$fp = fopen('export.html','w+');
fwrite($fp,$html_replaced);
fclose($fp)
exec('/path/to/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs /path/to/phantomjs/examples/rasterize.js /path/to/export.html /path/to/export.pdf "A3");
Now send the PDF to the user:
$this->getResponse()->clearHttpHeaders();
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Description','File Transfer');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Cache-Control','public, must-revalidate, max-age=0');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Pragma: public',true);
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Transfer-Encoding','binary');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-length',filesize('/path/to/export.pdf'));
$this->getResponse()->setContentType('application/pdf');
$this->getResponse()->setHttpHeader('Content-Disposition','attachment; filename=export.pdf');
$this->getResponse()->setContent(readfile('/path/to/export.pdf'));
$this->getResponse()->sendContent();
You do need to set the headers otherwise the browser does odd things. The filename for the generated HTML file and export should be unique to avoid the situation of two people generating PDF vouchers at the same time clashing. You can use something like sha1(time()) to add a randomised hash to a standard name e.g. 'export_'.sha1(time());
Use wkhtmltopdf, if possible. It is by far the best html2pdf converter a php coder can use.
And then do something like this (not tested, but should be pretty close):
public function executeGeneratePdf(sfWebRequest $request)
{
$this->getContext()->getResponse()->clearHttpHeaders();
$html = '*your html content*';
$pdf = new WKPDF();
$pdf->set_html($html);
$pdf->render();
$pdf->output(WKPDF::$PDF_EMBEDDED, 'whatever_name.pdf');
throw new sfStopException();
}

PHP Swift Mailer attach FPDF Problems

I am having some issues with trying to get SwiftMailer to attach a file I have created with FPDF. Basically I have a page called createPDF.php that is dynamically generated based on the ID number in the URL. This page is set to output the PDF inline using $pdf->Output("filename.pdf",I);. What I want to do is to be able to attach this file to an email using SwiftMailer from another page simply by calling my createPDF.php?id=xxx link.
From the PHP page where I want to send the email from, everything works, except the attachment. It attaches something, but not what I want and it is not viewable in a PDF viewer on my local machine. The line specific to the attaching the file is:
->attach(Swift_Attachment::fromPath('createPDF.php?id=xxxx'))
This does not work, but surely, it must be possible without saving the file on my web server by FPDF.
Is this possible? If so, how?
Thanks!
The problem here is Swiftmailer gets the file contents, it does not execute your php file. So the contents of your PDF will the code that is in createPDF.php.
why cant you safe the file first? You should be able to safe it and delete it when your email is sent.
<?php
$id = "xxx";
$fileName = "tmp/".sha1(time()+mt_rand(0,99999999));
include "createPDF.php"; //saves it to $fileName
->attach(Swift_Attachment::fromFile( $fileName )->setFilename('blaha.pdf'));
unlink($fileName);
Ok, so I just figured this out.
Basically I made a new PHP file with the bulk of my createPDF.php file as a function and simply passed in two variables into the function as my $id and an $output variable. $output is simply the way that FPDF outputs the file — inline, etc... I then set the function to return the output of the FPDF. In my createPDF.php file I simply call my function passing in $id and 'I' as the variables so it displays the correct PDF inline in the browser.
In my sendEmail function I simply pass in $id and 'S' and set it to a variable $content, which I pass into SwiftMailer as an attachment.
Works great.
Thanks for your help!

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