How to let DomPDF and Zend Framework play along

Tom — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:06:28 +0000

For a recent project, I had to generate a PDF for a catalog. Since I’m using Zend Framework for my development, first thing that sprang in mind was Zend_Pdf. After some investigation, I found it too “difficult” to use. Flexible though that component is, I didn’t feel much for using coordinates to draw each and every line and text of that PDF. So I went to find another solution: DomPDF. DomPDF can generates PDF output, from HTML input. Exactly what I wanted and needed. It was however quite tricky to get it working. If you also have problems with this, read on!

DomPDF isn’t part of the Zend Framework library, and as such doesn’t really follow the ZF conventions. That’s what caused me trouble: I couldn’t load the needed classes for it to work.

So how do you set everything up properly?

First step: set include path

When you’re setting your include paths, just add one for DomPDF.

1	set_include_path(APPLICATION_PATH . "/../../library/dompdf-0.5.1" . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());

Second step: make ZF & DomPDF play along

DomPDF has an autoloader which should take care of autoloading the classes for you. All you need to do, is make Zend Framework aware of that autoloader. The solution I found the most was this:

1 2	require_once 'dompdf_config.inc.php'; spl_autoload_register('DOMPDF_autoload');

However this may not work if you use Zend Framework 1.8 or newer. The real solution I found on a forum, where Matthew Weier O’Phinney enlightened another soul with the same problem:

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require_once 'dompdf_config.inc.php';
$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance(); // assuming we're in a controller
$autoloader->pushAutoloader('DOMPDF_autoload');

Final step: generate the PDF

That’s the simplest one, as I found no problems with that:

$dompdf = new DOMPDF();
$dompdf->set_paper("a4","portrait");
$dompdf->load_html($html);
$dompdf->set_base_path($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
$dompdf->render();
$dompdf->stream("document.pdf");

There you go, this should set you up to get DomPDF up and running.

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How to let DomPDF and Zend Framework play along