how to display PDF in a php site? - php

I am new to codeigniter, and not so new to PHP. I am developing a site that has a login for 2 users and once they login, it'll show an optin to view an invoice. I am not making the invoice since I have a stack of invoices already. I want to do it so that once they click on view invoice they can see a PDF. I have searched but I ask you for some idea in the visualization of PDF in codeigniter?

I'm guessing that you want to generate pdfs. There is a library called dompdf that lets you do it quite easily and there is documentation on using that with Codeigniter.
If you're wondering how to link between a pdf and a customer, I'd suggest adding a field in the database to match each customer or perhaps a whole table depending on your use case.

Not sure if I understand your question but here goes...
If you just want to marshal an existing PDF file via PHP, its basically a case of
Send the appropriate "Content-Type" response headers for a PDF file, eg application/pdf
Deliver the file contents using something like readfile()

From my understanding, you have a directory of PDFs that need to be displayed to the user.
This is usually handled by the PDF software. Adobe Reader can render the PDF in the browser and so can newer releases of the Chromium which have PDF viewing built in.
Make sure you send the correct response headers as Phil Brown points out and you're all set.

Related

Wordpress article and dynamic data/graphs, images to PDF

I'm using Wordpress to manage a newsletter with IssueM, also I need to be able to export the content of a group of articles to PDF (Keep in mind that I'm not a php hardcore developer).I'm using Advanced Custom Fields to generate some data and then creating graphs using NVD3 with javascript.
At this time, all the plugins I found to create PDF's did not work, they only "print" the title of the post(article in IssueM) and nothing else.
I need to be able to export the content, rendered graphs and tables with images, to PDF as they appear in the browser (styled via CSS in my page).
I found there is FPDF, and mPDF, also DOMPDF but they don't specify if they can render the javascript output (which are my NVD3 rendered graphs) to PDF.
Is there any tool that can acomplish this? or,
Do I have to do this by hand? If that's the case, can you tell me an approach?
Have you had a look at:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/printfriendly/
You should be able to add/remove/customize elements that print out:
http://support.printfriendly.com/publisher/developer-questions/include-exclude-content/
It should render javascript because it is using javascript (make sure you enable javascript use in the plugin):
http://support.printfriendly.com/publisher/wordpress/javascript-option/
Hope that helps!

how to disable save option for fpdf generated files in php?

i am using fpdf to generate reports in php. I don't want users to save the generated pdfs. They will only print the documents.How can i do it?Any help will be appreciated.
Pretty sure as long as this is sent to the client's browser from the server to display the pdf there is honestly nothing you can really do to prevent a user from "saving" it, they'll find a way.
Trying to prevent users from saving the PDF is the same as trying to prevent users from creating screenshots, they always find a work around. Also to be able to print PDF, the PDF has to be stored in the users cache to send it to their printer. Also some browsers cannot show the PDF with the option to print it, they have to download the PDF to open it in ie Adobe Reader to print it from there.
I would like to suggest not to create PDF for this, otherwise if PDF will be opened at browser that can be easily saved or copied. If you allow users to download it then make a copy of report in PDF and let client download it.

Is any progress bar feature implemented with TCPDF API

From last 6 hours trying best to show progress bar wile pdf is generated in TCPDF but not successful.
I am using TCPDF API for HTML to PDF generation, But the problem is that while generating the PDF we can't use custom javascript, Can we show progress bar while PDF is generated?
Any idea please?
I am not sure why you say "can't use custom javascript". If you just want a "loading icon" yoy should do this
- show loading icon (from js)
- ajax request to php file that generates the pdf into a server file
- on success you get a link to a generated pdf.
(for this solution you might try some estimation based on how large would be the generated file)
If you want an accurate progressive, you should add some estimation on php file. Let's say when you generate the pdf you know how many pages you will generate and each "addPage" command you save the status of completeness in a file or a memcached key. On you JavaScript side you call a file each second that reads that status of completeness.
No.
Even if you were able to use custom javascript, it would not be possible to get an accurate prediction of the time it will take to generate the document and therefore diplay progress - but it would be possible to get an estimate (based on extensive benchmarking). But in order to display the progress bar you'd need custom javascript and to change the processing to decouple the threads on the browser and server. This is discussed more in this question (which IMHO is not a duplicate of the post referenced).

Chrome - Save to PDF function use in a website

Chrome allows users to hit Ctrl + P and choose 'Save to PDF'.
Is it possible to have this function through an html button?
I want the user to just hit a button and go directly to the Save as PDF prompt ( where the file name is set by PHP and not automatically by Chrome ). So the user basically just hits the button and clicks on Save on the prompt window.
Is this possible?
Can I skip the previous steps?
Nope, it's not possible.
But, you can give the user the choice to download a HTML file output as a PDF file. There are a few libraries around, Prince is the best but expensive, so check out DOMPDF.
By the time your user can hit ctrl+P in the browse, the PHP process that generated the page (on server) is already closed.
Besides the fact that PHP exerts no direct control over browsers. It just sends them information in the form of HTML/CSS and important in this case JavaScript.
With JavaScript you could trigger the normal print behaviour of the browser but you would have no control over it.
Another approach could be to generate the PDF on server and send it as a file to the browser. In which case the browser will either ask the user if he wants to open it or it will ask the user if he wants to download it.
I've personally used fPDF to customise the PDF invoices of various open source e-commerce software. Like for example PrestaShop.
All you really need to do is download the library from (fPDF](http://www.fpdf.org/), but seeing it in action and being able to change/adapt a working version might help you so you could look for the PDF invoice in a fresh the PrestaShop install inside the folder classes the file name is PDF.php .
I lost several hours trying to make conversion to pdf on the server with no luck because my view contains some jquery functions that do the main rendering. I thought of providing a button to save as pdf using the browser but then opted to using javascript on the client side to do the rendering to pdf. This may not be the optimal solution in certain cases but looked the most sensible one in my case.
there are many libraries I just started using html2pdf.js and it is working fine so far.

Allow users to download PDFs in PHP5, ZEND, MVC environment

All,
I have a PHP5 application written with Zend Framework and MVC style. My application allows multiple users to login and see content based on their privileges. I have a dropdown on the home page. Upon selecting the dropdown, an ajax call occurs which populates the page with a table. Also, it generates a PDF file with the table data using mpdf library. There is a link called "Download PDF" in the page to allow the user to download the generated pdf.
My question is, in such environment, how to best serve pdfs to multiple users? Should I serve a single pdf with the a common name or should I create multple pdfs based on the dropdown value (looks like an overkill)? I don't want to let the users see each other's pdfs. Also, where should I store the pdfs as pretty much the entire application directory will have only 750 acccess.
Thanks,
User clicks "downlod PDF"
Parameters like ID are sent with ajax
Is there a cached version of the PDF with that ID saved? Ok, show it to the user; else:
Generate PDF
Cache it
Show PDF to user
I would have a cache key like userid-documentid (user1-document1 for example) and name the document something that would make them recognize it in a "downloads folder": your-app document-name date.pdf (ABC Half year report 2010-07.pdf for example).
I would store the cache in a /tmp directory somewhere, and present the cached data with a custom header; the following is from Example 1 # php.net:
<?php
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="ABC Half year report 2010-07.pdf"');
readfile('/tmp/user1-document1');

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