ways of print large number pages of report

Question

I need to print large number pages of aging report using php. Numbers of pages may up to thousand. Whats the best way to print this report? - direct send to printer - css - pdf - others?

Any suggestion?

Thank you!

Answer 1

If there are thousands of pages I would recommend using a background task to generate a PDF file.

To do this your frontend can write for example a database entry, that says "todo". Then configure a cron job etc. that calls a php script to check e.g. every minute for a PDF-generator todo.

In your PHP configuration check, that you are allowed to use the "set_time_limit()" function. This function resets the max. execution time of a script. You must call this function in your generator script, before the max. execution time has exceeded. Otherwise your PHP script will be stopped before the work is done.

Another problem may be the PHP memory limit. You can increase the memory limit by setting "memory_limit" to a value that matches your use-case. Try different values to find the memory limit that is high enough to run your script. Also don't save too much data in your PHP scripts to avoid high memory usage.

While the background script is running you can write a file or a data-base entry that could be read by a frontend, that shows the PDF-generator progress. When the generator has finished, you can provide the file for download in a frontend.

Here are some links for further reading:

• http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php
• How to create cron job using PHP?
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/info.configuration.php
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php