Let's say you have a huge database of various types of books. On your website, visitors have the option to download sample booklet (in pdf format) of a book for which they are looking. In the old days, you have to create all of those pdf files manually or whatever way you can then upload them onto web server. Links to those pdf files have to be set up in advance properly. If you add new books to your database, the same process of making sample booklet will be repeated.
Today, that process can be done just in one php file which uses some libraries to generate pdf booklet on the fly as soon as a visitor asks for downloading it. I will show you this simple step in a moment.
However, what could you do if you do want to send those booklet to your visitors through provided email address instead of downloading them. Should you give them a link to the file or attach them with that email? A link in an email is nothing easier but attachment. After showing you how to create a pdf file on the fly using FPDF class, I will demonstrate how to attach that pdf file into emails.
PART I: Create PDF file on the fly
To generate a PDF file using PHP, you need a tool that supports you to do so. In this tutorial, I use FPDF which is completely free and can be downloaded from http://www.fpdf.org. Following are some highlight features:
° Choice of measure unit, page format and margins
° Page header and footer management
° Automatic page break
° Automatic line break and text justification
° Image support (JPEG and PNG)
° Colors
° Links
° TrueType, Type1 and encoding support
° Page compression
You do not need to have any extra tool to get FPDF to work. However, if you choose to use compression feature, zlib is required. FPDF works just fine with PHP version 4 and 5.
In this tutorial, the main purpose is how to send a pdf that you create on the fly as an email attachment. So, the following simple example on how to create a pdf file using PHP is borrowed from FPDF website. Visit FPDF website for full documentation and tutorials.
<?php
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf=new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output();
?>
The sample code above just returns a pdf file with the message "Hello World!" as usual. I will use the same code in the next part of this tutorial.
Make sure you download the fpdf.php from FPDF website and place it in the same folder with the example file or using absolute/relative path to fpdf.php if it is in another folder.
PART II: Sending pdf as email attachment
You can send email using just native PHP code. However, to make this task simple, I prefer to use PEAR's Mail class which can be obtained from http://pear.php.net. Do not forget to get a copy of PEAR's Mime class because PEAR's Mail need it to attach files into emails.
Make sure you set up all those PEAR classes properly in order to get this to work.
<?php
require('fpdf/fpdf.php');
$pdf=new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdfcontent = $pdf->Output("helloworld.pdf", "S");
require_once('Mail.php');
require_once('Mail/mime.php');
// email address of the recipient
$to = "youremail@yahoo.com";
// email address of the sender
$from = "senderemail@yahoo.com";
// subject of the email
$subject = "Hello world from coolersport";
// email header format complies the PEAR's Mail class
// this header includes sender's email and subject
$headers = array('From' => $from,
'Subject' => $subject);
// We will send this email as HTML format
// which is well presented and nicer than plain text
// using the heredoc syntax
// REMEMBER: there should not be any space after PDFMAIL keyword
$htmlMessage = <<<PDFMAIL
<html>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff">
<p align="center">
Please find the pdf attached in the email.<br>
This is generated by <b style="font-size:18pt;">FPDF</b>
</p>
</body>
</html>
PDFMAIL;
// create a new instance of the Mail_Mime class
$mime = new Mail_Mime();
// set HTML content
$mime->setHtmlBody($htmlMessage);
// IMPORTANT: add pdf content as attachment
$mime->addAttachment($pdfcontent, 'application/pdf', 'helloworld.pdf', false, 'base64');
// build email message and save it in $body
$body = $mime->get();
// build header
$hdrs = $mime->headers($headers);
// create Mail instance that will be used to send email later
$mail = &Mail::factory('mail');
// Sending the email, according to the address in $to,
// the email headers in $hdrs,
// and the message body in $body.
$mail->send($to, $hdrs, $body);
?>
You can notice that this will send email using built-in PHP mail() function, so make sure your web server can send email. I reckon the localhost will not work in this case. Look at the line:
// create Mail instance that will be used to send email later
$mail = &Mail::factory('mail');
If you want to send email using SMTP or other method, please read instruction in PEAR documentation.
As you can see, in the sample in part 1, the function output() is used without any parameter. As default, FPDF will return PDF code to http stream and will be display at client browser. In the example of part 2, output() function has two parameters. The first one is file name of that pdf file, which will be ignored because the second parameter "S" is used. Passing string "S" in the second parameter of the output() function will tell FPDF to return PDF file as a string instead of output it to client browser. As you can see, the result is stored in $pdfcontent and attached into the email later. The addAttachment() function will cast the $pdfcontent string into "base64" format which will produce correct format for the pdf file in email attachment.
Conclusion
I do not want to cover too much information in this tutorial except what has been discussed above. If you'd like to understand more about FPDF and PEAR's functions, please visit their website.
I hope that this will give you a idea of what the tutorial title says and you can put this into work.
