01 The class Report

See example 1

This class manages the printable area on the pages, and it prints the pages into the PDF document during the output operation. It contains a SerialFrame (see section 2.14) for the body of the report as well as one for the header and for the footer. To build up a report you can add frames with content to the body. The body is the outermost frame in your report.

To create a PDF document, you have to call the output function after you have added all content to the report structure. The library will then loop recursively over the structure to calculate sizes and positions. If you need the total number of pages in the report (e.g., in the footer or header) the ReportLib will use two passes to count first the number of total pages. If you need that, then you have to force it by calling setCountPages.

This is the first class that you have to instantiate if you want to create a report structure. The constructor has a parameter which defines the page format that the library will use for the report (class PageFormat). If you do not provide this parameter a default PageFormat will be used.

// Create report instance
//  default format A4, portrait with margins left = 20mm, top = right = bottom = 10mm
$report = new ReportLib\Report();

Now the report structure is prepared, and you can append content to it to create the report. Therefore, you can get a reference to the report body frame which is a vertical organized SerialFrame. I describe Serial frames later in this document.

If you want to add content to the report body, you just get a reference of it from the report object and call the addFrame function to add the content frame. That may look like in the following code excerpt:

// Create report instance
$report = new ReportLib\Report();

// Get ref to the report body
$body = $report->getBody();

// Get the default text style
$tsNormal = ReportLib\TextStyles::getTextStyle(ReportLib\TextStyles::NORMAL);

// Create a text frame
$tf = new ReportLib\TextFrame(“Text to print”, $ts);

// Add the text to the body
$body->addFrame($tf);

This example just adds some text in a TextFrame to the report body.