The commercial product you might be thinking off might be Crystal Reports: http://www.businessobjects.com/. I have not worked with their product since their version 7, but I remember that if you wanted a report in HTML what they did is send zillions of absolutely positioned <div>s with width and height spec and assembled the page from those. It did not require any plug-in installed on the client side. It used the page-break-after or -before CSS attribute for page breaks. Satyam "Steve Brown" <sbrown25@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1f4ef097050423074354ab7df1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > My plan is move away from the current solution but I am still confused > of how am I going to get control of the layout of the report. > Generate a PDF ? Use CSS ? > > Some of the "trick" parts are, for instance, to have the same header > in all pages of the same report, if I have tabular data greater than > the height of the page continue in the next page etc. I used to encounter the same problems with reporting in our business software. You can generate reports and spit out HTML in a new window and have the user print the report from the browser, but that has many drawbacks. It only works with simple data sets, its difficult (or impossible) to control page breaks, lack of precision placing, etc. Now I use FPDF to generate PDF reports (http://www.fpdf.org/). Its free, easy to use, and pretty flexible. It allows you to do precision placement on a page, add headers, footers, etc, etc, etc. Be sure to check out the "Scripts" section, its got a bunch of useful tips for expanding functionality of the classes. There is another commerical product out there (can't thin of the name right now) that is supposed to be faster, but FPDF is pretty fast in our applications. I also use the JPGraph package for generating graphs (http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/). This is *really* slick. Its free for personal use, about $125 for commercial use. You need to install some additional PHP libraries (JPEG, PNG, GD at least), but its fast and easy. I love playing around with this product because the possibilities for what you can do are almost endless. HTH, Steve -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
