dompdf Customization Question - php

Question

I'm trying to optimize dompdf to do something a bit strange. As it is on my server, dompdf is generating a pdf file (for the client requesting the file) from a php/html file stored somewhere on the server. This is cool because it doesn't bog the server down with pdf files, but the problem I have is that I want someone to be able to export a group of PDFs and receive them in a zip file or something similar.
Is there a way to make dompdf export a group of PDF files, based on the filenames of the php/html files, to a zip file or something so the person requesting it can download it?
Let me know if more information is needed.
Thank you!!

Answer 1

DOMPDF only handles a single file at a time. But you could write a PHP script to accept the list of files and then use DOMPDF to parse each one separately. Since DOMPDF can return the rendered PDF as a string you could write each file out to a temporary directory then archive the results when you're done. Or, if you're using dompdf.php you could use exec() to process each HTML document in a similar loop.
Here's a simple example showing one way to do what you want:
$files_html = array('docs/file1.html','docs/file2.html');
foreach ($files_html as $file) {
exec('dompdf.php ' . $file);
}
$zip = new ZipArchive();
$zip->open('docs/pdfs.zip', ZipArchive::CREATE);
$files_pdf = glob('docs/*.pdf');
foreach ($files_pdf as $file) {
$zip->addFile($file);
}
$zip->close();
header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=pdfs.zip);
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
readfile('docs/pdfs.zip');
There are some discussions of using DOMPDF to batch process files in the forum and issue tracker.