09 The class SerialFrame
This is a derivation of the ContainerFrame class which can contain a series of frames. A SerialFrame has a direction which is either horizontal or vertical. All frames may contain any kind of content or other container frames.
The following example shows how you instantiate a horizontal SerialFrame. For a vertical SerialFrame you obviously use the parameter ‘V’.
$sf = new ReportLib\SerialFrame('H');
$body->addFrame($sf);
There is only one additional attribute for this class which defines how the library places the frames on the page. Either it can be horizontally i.e., one frame right to the previous one or vertically which means the frames are one below the other.
The SerialFrame inherits the addFrame function from the ContainerFrame which you can use to add content or other container frames to the frame. As mentioned in the last section you will use the BoxFrame and the SerialFrame very often to create a report. Because you can add containers into containers you can create complex tree structures. But it is also a pitfall because you can create endless recursive structures when you add the wrong object to a frame – a circular dependency. The ReportLib checks that when you try to create output of your report structure and throws an exception if a circular dependency is detected.