[H-GEN] Pdf-php puzzle

[Michael Anthon]

Byron Ellacott wrote:

> It doesn't seem to be that PHP is an appropriate tool for generating 
> non-HTML content at all.  YMMV.  Bear in mind I don't consider PHP to 
> be a good tool for generating HTML content, either, in most 
> circumstances.

It has it's uses but it also has it's limitations and if you aren't 
aware of them they can bite and bite hard.  The particular script I 
pulled that from is pretty evil however it would be just as evil in any 
other language.  It's basically a way of wrapping authentication around 
a bunch of report sources that don't have any decent authentication 
built in and had to be able to handle various report formats (html, pdf, 
csv, xls) and various sources of this data (fixed files on the server 
and reports from an oracle reports server on another machine via http as 
well as dynmically generated reports from another http server).  It's an 
awful awful hack but it works.

Cheers,
Michael