Brief introduction to LiveDocx in PHP

Summary

Zend_Service_LiveDocx allows developers to generate documents by combining structured data from PHP with a template, created in a word processor. The resulting document can be saved as a PDF, DOCX, DOC or RTF file. The concept is the same as with mail-merge.

Work flow overview

  1. Load template in Zend_Service_LiveDocx.
  2. Assign data to text fields in template.
  3. Generate document.
  4. Save as a PDF, DOCX, DOC or RTF file.

Work flow as PHP

This template is populated with the following data to generate this document.

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$mailMerge = new Zend_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge();
 
$mailMerge->setUsername('myUsername')
          ->setPassword('myPassword');
 
$mailMerge->setLocalTemplate('template.docx');
 
$mailMerge->assign('software', 'Magic Graphical Compression Suite v1.9')
          ->assign('licensee', 'Henry Döner-Meyer')
          ->assign('company',  'Co-Operation')
          ->assign('date',     'January 11, 2010')
          ->assign('time',     'January 11, 2010')
          ->assign('city',     'Berlin')
          ->assign('country',  'Germany');
 
$mailMerge->createDocument();
 
$document = $mailMerge->retrieveDocument('pdf');
 
file_put_contents('document.pdf', $document);

Try for yourself

Want to try this out?

Take a look at the getting started guide for details or contact the author.

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