CREATING PDF'S FROM VERY LARGE PAGES - Jan 6th, 2015
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As the cookbook grew to well over 400 recipes (records) in late 2014, conversion to PDF became a problem. Server memory
allocation issues were keeping the PDFs from being created.
Dave Edis from Interactive Tools came up with a simple, elegant solution for creating multiple PDFs, each containing a
set number of recipes (records) , and displaying a paging menu at the top of the viewer.
At the top of the viewer, the load records call contains a conditional statement that determines when perPage
limitations are implemented. In this case when there is a request for a PDF to be created. (The 'loadCreatedBy' =>
false, reduces the server load slightly). There’s also a createPDF_fromOutput instruction.
if (@$_REQUEST['pdf']) {
list($table_of_contentsRecords, $table_of_contentsMetaData) = getRecords(array(
'tableName' => 'table_of_contents',
'perPage' => 100,
'loadCreatedBy' => false,
));
}
else {
list($table_of_contentsRecords, $table_of_contentsMetaData) = getRecords(array(
'tableName' => 'table_of_contents',
'loadCreatedBy' => false,
));
}
if (@$_REQUEST['pdf']) { createPDF_fromOutput('inline', 'example.pdf'); }
Then in the body, this code changes the background color of the page if a PDF is requested:
<?php if (@$_REQUEST['pdf']): ?>
<body style="background-color:#FFF">
<?php else: ?>
<body style="background-color:#9FF">
<?php endif ?>
And the code that creates a dynamic paging menu:
<?php
$recordCount = mysql_count('table_of_contents');
$recordsPerPage = 100;
$pageCount = 1;
print "We now have $recordCount recipes!\n";
while (($pageCount * $recordsPerPage) < ($recordCount + $recordsPerPage)) {
$recipesLow = sprintf("%03s", ($pageCount-1) * $recordsPerPage + 1 );
$recipesHigh = min($recordCount, ($pageCount * $recordsPerPage) );
print "Section $pageCount (Recipes $recipesLow - $recipesHigh)";
print " - <a href='cookbook.php?page=$pageCount'>View HTML</a>";
print " - <a href='cookbook.php?page=$pageCount&pdf=1'>Download PDF</a>";
$pageCount = $pageCount + 1; // show next page
}
?>
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