Hi,
I agree that PHP doesn’t have a decent reporting tool yet. I’m working on an implementation, that at my office several projects are already using and we are happy with the results.
It’s based in XSLT to consume your data, that must be given as XML and produces a XSL-FO report. Which get’s processed by the proper Renderer class (PDF, HTML, anyone you want to add…). The PDF are perfect thanks to ApacheFOP. All this workflow is handled by the reporting tool. Which you can consume in your PHP client class with 2 lines of code.
As a templating engine, we use MS Word, save docs as Word XML 2003 and process them with a modified version of Word2FO.xsl stylesheets, which instead of rendering an identical FO document, renders an XSLT that, if processed again, with input data XML, generates the XSL-FO report.
So far, it’s a symfony 1.4 plugin, we already use an unreleased sf2 bundle. and I plan to make a standalone component soon.
Here you have the project links
Here is the project page:
github.com/juanmf/sfPlugins/tree/master/reportPlugin
Here is the HowTo create templates with Word:
github.com/juanmf/sfPlugins/blob/master/reportPlugin/doc/HowToReport.pdf?raw=true
Hope you can manage to give it a try, once you installed it it’s really easy to use and very powerful.
Cheers, any feedback is welcome.
Juan