CREATING PDF'S FROM SEARCH RESULTS - Nov 18th, 2019

I had a rather complex search form and needed to create a PDF of the search results so they could be easily downloaded and printed. Daniel Louwe from Interactive Tools came to the rescue (again) with the following suggestion: "Because you want to create a PDF of the search results, you need to simulate the form being submitted at the same time as the PDF generation. Clicking the link with "?pdf=1" clears all of the search values, as well as the "save" value that tells the page to show the search results. One fairly minimal solution I can think of is instead of using a "convert this page to PDF" link, you could add a checkbox to the form with the name "pdf" and value "1" labelled something like "View search results as a PDF" so that the user can choose to receive a PDF of the results instead of a web page when they submit the form, rather than clicking a link afterwards." For example, the final code in my form was <tr> <td align="right" class="text_font">&nbsp;</td> <td align="left" valign="bottom" colspan="2"> <input type = "checkbox" id="pdf" name="pdf" value = "1" <?php checkedIf(1, @$_REQUEST['pdf']);?> /> <span class="text_font"><b>Check to create a downloadable PDF of the search results instead of a web page</b></span></td> </tr> Daniel went on to suggest: "Another simple - but more tedious - solution is to add "save=1" to the URL in addition to the relevant form values. A simple working example is http://your_site.com/your_search_page.php?pdf=1&save=1&your_search_field_keyword[]=1. The two main tasks you'd have are 1) building the URL string based on the submitted form values, and 2) updating the code to account for when both $_REQUEST['pdf'] and $_REQUEST['save'] are on; e.g. removing the original "convert this page to PDF" link." Note: The brackets [] after _keyword are because in my form this field in the table that I'm searching got its values from a pulldown list that accessed second table, and so this was that field's name in the form.

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