Dream House

For some days I was thinking to update my site to latest version of WordPress. But I was not sure how much time will take to complete the task and what complexity I will have to face.

Today is my holiday and I am a little bit free today. So, I decided to upgrade my WordPress setup. Taking a deep breath I started reading the “Upgrading WordPress - Three Step Upgrade“ guide. Followed the instruction carefully and within half an hour I was able to upgrade it successfully. I found this process very easy and less time consuming.

Thanks WordPress!

I have modified the plugin for DOMPDF which is found in CodeIgniter forum. I have added the paper size and orientation parameters. Here is the code to share with you.

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<?php if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
 
    function pdf_create($html, $filename, $stream=true, $papersize = 'letter', $orientation = 'portrait')
    {
        require_once("dompdf/dompdf_config.inc.php");
 
        $dompdf = new DOMPDF();
        $dompdf->load_html($html);
        $dompdf->set_paper($papersize, $orientation);
        $dompdf->render();
 
        if ($stream)
        {
            $options['Attachment'] = 1;
            $options['Accept-Ranges'] = 0;
            $options['compress'] = 1;
            $dompdf->stream($filename.".pdf", $options);
        }
        else
        {
            write_file("$filename.pdf", $dompdf->output());
        }
    }
?>

I was implementing PDF generation in one of projects which is built with CodeIgniter. I searched for PDF support for CodeIgniter and found help on CI forum. I followed the instruction given there and used DOMPDF. The result was satisfactory though I faced an issue. I was happy, but the problem was with the PDFLib. Its not free and our client would not buy it. I thought that DOMPDF will not work without the help of PDFLib. Soon I loss my happiness and started looking for an alternate solution. Then our team decided to use HTML2FPDF. But the result was not satisfactory. We had to rewrite our html files. It was lacking lots of HTML support. I was not happy with the output. So I started googling again for a PDF library. While searching I came accross a library called HTML2PS/HTML2PDF. But, it seemed to me complex. I again started searching for any solution which will help me use DOMPDF in my project without PDFLib. At last I got the solution from DOMPDF site ;).

“…Edit dompdf_config.inc.php to fit your installation. If you leave the DOMPDF_PDF_BACKEND setting at ‘auto’ dompdf will use PDFLib if it is installed, otherwise it will use the bundled R&OS CPDF class…”

I was very much happy to read this. I might have missed this while installing DOMPDF for the first time. Thanks DOMPDF for a nice interface and output. Really DOMPDF made our coding not just easy, but saved our times :).

I have used DOMPDF in my project. But I was facing problem with Attachment. In FireFox it was working fine. But in Internet Explorer (I used IE 6) it ended with an error. In IE it was showing the download dialogue box offering the script page I used to generate the PDF file. When I tried to download the file it showed an error.

I searched the web and found no suitable solution. I followed the instruction given in http://www.corenettech.com/blog/ but it didn’t work :(. But I got an idea from this post. I started digging the code and have done following changes to PDFLib_Adapter class (available in DOMPDF_DiRECTORY/include/pdflib_adapter.cls.php).

I have removed the following line (line 829):

829

header("Cache-Control: private");

and added

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if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "MSIE"))
{
     header('Expires: 0');
     header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
     header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
     header('Pragma: public');
     header("Content-Length: ".strlen($data));
}
else
{
     header("Cache-Control: private");
     header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
     header('Expires: 0');
     header('Pragma: no-cache');
     header("Content-Length: ".strlen($data));
}

After

header("Content-type: application/pdf");
header("Content-Disposition: $attach; filename=\"$filename\"");

That’s it! My code started working :).

Hope this will save your time of surfing the net ;).

Based on my last post on paging using PHP and MySQL, I have coded this class. It is very easy to implement and it will save your time. Here is a code snippet to show how simple to use it.

//include the class file
include('Pager.php');
 
//making connection to the database
mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', '');
mysql_select_db('test');
 
//prepare SQL
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM books';
 
//create an object of Pager passing the SQL
$pager = new Pager($sql);
 
//set the url. this is the current page
$pager->url = 'index.php';
 
//set number of rows. by default it is 10
$pager->rowPerPage = 5;
 
//build the pager
$pager->build();
 
//get paged data
$rows = $pager->getPagedData();

Click the download link given below for a copy of the class. It also includes an working example.