Although the release of Zend Framework 2.0 is a long way off — currently there is no official release plan — contributors are encouraged to port their components as soon as possible.

Therefore, I am delighted to announce that you can download a version of \Zend\Service\LiveDocx, complete with the latest development version of Zend Framework 2.0 from my account at GitHub.

In particular, take a look at the shipped demo applications, in the directory /demos/Zend/Service/LiveDocx. They illustrate how to use all parts of the framework and offer a good introduction to the usage of namespaces in PHP 5.3, if this topic is new to you.

To whet your appetite, below is the bitmaps demo:

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use Zend\Date\Date;
use Zend\Service\LiveDocx\MailMerge;
 
$mailMerge = new MailMerge();
 
$mailMerge->setUsername('myUsername')
          ->setPassword('myPassword');
 
$mailMerge->setLocalTemplate('template.docx');
 
$mailMerge->assign('software', 'Magic Graphical Compression Suite v1.9')
          ->assign('licensee', 'Daï Lemaitre')
          ->assign('company',  'Megasoft Co-operation')
          ->assign('date',     Date::now()->toString(Date::DATE_LONG))
          ->assign('time',     Date::now()->toString(Date::TIME_LONG))
          ->assign('city',     'Lyon')
          ->assign('country',  'France');
 
$mailMerge->createDocument();
 
// Get all bitmaps
$bitmaps = $mailMerge->getAllBitmaps(100, 'png');      // zoomFactor, format
 
foreach ($bitmaps as $pageNumber => $bitmapData) {
    $filename = sprintf('document-page-%d.png', $pageNumber);
    file_put_contents($filename, $bitmapData);
}
 
unset($mailMerge);

Note, this is development code and should not yet be used in production applications.

Have you ever tried to create a professional quality document programmatically from within PHP? It’s a real pain and surprisingly tricky to do. There are limited options for PHP developers to produce files in the formats most often used in business. There are libraries for producing PDF files in PHP but they are complex and are difficult to use for producing documents.

Read the full text at:

• Creating Professional Documents the Easy Way

LiveDocx will be deployed by the unconference in their contribution and interests web application. Using this application, unconference participants can register a session that they would like to host, or register an interest in a specific topic. Another unconference participant can then register a session, based upon the original person’s interest.

The LiveDocx powered contribution and interests web application allows the collection of this data and generates the so called vote posters. To decide upon which sessions may actually be hosted, there is a voting process on each morning of the unconference. In this process, participants stick little stickers onto the vote posters. The session advertised on vote posters with the most stickers may then be hosted.

This democratic method of deciding upon which sessions may be hosted is the quintessence of an unconference and the defining difference from a traditional conference: The participants of an unconference decide, on the day, which sessions they would like to have hosted.

LiveDocx is also being used to generate the badges for the unconference. This is a typical mail-merge application and ideally suited to LiveDocx: The badge template, created by a graphic designer, is populated with data in PHP. The data that is inserted into the template (name, organization, blog, WiFi credentials etc.) originates from the database of unconference participants, merged with a database of WiFi credentials.

In each of the above two applications, LiveDocx is used to generate the final documents. One document per PDF file. Additionally, there is a script to concentrate each set of PDF files together, so that the unconference organizers simply need to send two PDF files to the printers to get a hard copy of all the vote posters and badges.

LiveDocx is proud to support PHP Unconference Europe with professional document generation services.

The last three events were excellent opportunities to hear leading speakers in the web development field and of course to participate in the sessions themselves.

The event’s web site and blog are at:
http://www.php-unconference.de

And its Twitter feed here:
http://twitter.com/phpunconference

Tickets for the event cost only EUR 30.00. This includes entry to both conference days, food and drinks. In comparison to other PHP conferences, it is an absolute bargain and the quality of the presentations is just as high. Tickets are selling out really quickly, so register today at:
http://de.amiando.com/phpunconference.html

(Students of the Hamburg University get in free! But hurry, there are limited free tickets. See this post.)

Alessandro Nuzzo has just published a great introduction about Zend_Service_LiveDocx. If you are able to read Italian take a look at the following:

Mi capita spesso di dover generare dinamicamente dei file PDF o DOC. Alla ricerca di una soluzione che mi facilitasse il lavoro mi sono imbattuto in LiveDocx, un servizio basato su SOAP che permette di generare dei documenti partendo da dei template creati con un word processor. Solitamente quando devo generare dei PDF utilizzo 2 approcci: o l’”HTML-to-PDF Approach” oppure il “Programmatic Approach”.

Continue reading:

• LiveDocx: template based document generation

Julien Pauli has just published a great commentary about Zend_Service_LiveDocx, comparing it to his library odtphp. If you are able to read French take a look at the following:

Voila quelques temps j’ai sorti odtphp, un script PHP qui analyse des fichiers odt à la recherche de “tags” et qui les remplace par des données que vous fournissez.
C’est très pratique pour générer des factures ou d’autres documents basés sur un template odt et une source de données type MySQL.

Continue reading:

• LiveDocx : service web de templating de documents

Gjero Krsteski has just published an introduction that illustrates how to create word processing documents using Zend_Service_LiveDocx. If you are new to Zend_Service_LiveDocx and can read German, this is a great starting point:

Letztens stand ich vor der Herausforderung, eine PDF-Klasse zu schreiben, die PDF-Dateien erzeugt. Als Inhalt für die PDF Dateien waren sensible Kundendaten angedacht. Diese Anforderung war mir nicht fremd, jedoch konnte ich mich gut daran erinnern, dass sie mit viel Arbeit verbunden war. Die meisten Libraries bieten nur die Möglichkeit, die PDF-Dateien Zeile pro Zeile zu generieren Je nachdem woher man die Daten dafür beschaffen muss, kann sich dies zu einem mühseligem Unterfangen entwickeln. Hier kann ich aktuell zwei Lösungsansätze vorschlagen, die leicht anzuwenden sind und eine gute Sicherheit gewährleisten.

Continue reading:

• PDF Datei erzeugen

You may have heard about FPDF, TCPDF. These are used to generate PDF document in PHP. But very few of you may have heard about LiveDocx, can be found here http://www.livedocx.com/. The most cool news I’m going to tell you that Zend Framework 1.10.0 provides clean and simple interface to LiveDocx API. LiveDocx is soap based service. If you are interested more in LiveDocx, following the link I’ve already provided you.

Continue reading:

• Creating word processing document using Zend_Service_LiveDocx

Download Zend Framework 1.10.0 Full and read the updated documentation on ZendFramework.com.

You can find Zend_Service_LiveDocx_* at the following locations in the distribution tree:

Source code

/library/Zend/Service/LiveDocx.php
/library/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMerge.php
/library/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/Exception.php

Unit tests

/tests/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/LiveDocxTest.php
/tests/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMergeTest.php
/tests/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMerge/*

Demonstration applications

/demos/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/*

I really recommend taking a look at the demonstration applications, as they illustrate all of Zend_Service_LiveDocx functionality.

You can check that your server environment is set up correctly to run Zend_Service_LiveDocx, by executing check-environment.php in the directory /demos/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/.

I would like to thank Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Zend Framework Project Lead and all other members of the Zend Framework community, who have contributed to Zend_Service_LiveDocx.

As of the first alpha version of Zend Framework 1.10, the functionality of Tis_Service_LiveDocx is available directly in the Zend Framework in Zend_Service_LiveDocx.

As of today, the use of Tis_Service_LiveDocx is deprecated. Instead use Zend_Service_LiveDocx.

With the exception of the constructor, the API of Zend_Service_LiveDocx is 100% backward compatible to that of Tis_Service_LiveDocx.

At the wish of the Zend Framework community, the constructor was updated from:

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// deprecated - do not use
$mailMerge = new Tis_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge('myUsername', 'myPassword');

to:

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// correct - do use
$mailMerge = new Zend_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge(
    array (
        'username' => 'myUsername',
        'password' => 'myPassword'
    )
);
 
// alternatively
$mailMerge = new Zend_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge();
 
$mailMerge->setUsername('myUsername')
          ->setPassword('myPassword');

I would encourage you to update your projects to use the Zend_Service_LiveDocx family of classes.

If you need any assistance in migrating your code, please post a support request into the support forum.