Question

I have a question. I have to prepare a good report module for an application in PHP and MySQL. The report should be in two forms: a graph and a normal table with text. Tables and text are simple, but the graph is what I don’t know how to begin. I was thinking about HTML5 (canvas) and Javascript, but honestly I don’t know if this is a good idea.

I don’t know if HTML5 is rendered on all browsers in the same way. A while ago it was a problem and I didn’t have time to investigate it by myself. Good tips about new elements (canvas, article, footer and so on) on different browsers (including mobile ones) would be nice.

Maybe someone had similar problem and can give a tip on how to begin?

Answer 1

One thing you might consider is using wkhtmltopdf to generate a PDF of whatever HTML5 you want, using the consistent Webkit rendering engine. I’d set it up like this:

• The user clicks a link that says “generate”
• This loads a script which runs the report (generates the data, etc.) and outputs the HTML needed to a temporary file
• Invoke wkhtmltopdf using the temporary HTML file as input and output it to a temporary PDF
• Read the PDF into PHP, set the headers, and output the PDF to the browser

This should create a fairly seamless experience and shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to run, and since it’s Webkit, you can use whatever Javascript library you want to make charts (I like flot).