CakePHP 1.3 and DomPDF
After a lot of ridiculous meddling with code, I took a break and came back to trying to get DomPDF working with CakePHP 1.3. There were a few major problems, but most have been fixed now with only a couple of styling issues to make this work.
The goal was to output an already styled HTML page to PDF with as little effort as possible, so that we could then reuse this package across multiple sites without having to relayout the pages or reconfigure the php each time. DomPDF appeared to be a good way to go about this, but the first error I was running into was DomPDF’s autoloader attempting to load cake core classes from its own include directory. I tried to figure out where this was coming from but was hitting a wall over and over again, the fix ended up being pretty simple and its this:
In the dom_configure.inc.php just add an if statement as follows
function DOMPDF_autoload($class) {
$filename = mb_strtolower($class) . ".cls.php";
if(is_file(DOMPDF_INC_DIR . "/$filename")){
require_once(DOMPDF_INC_DIR . "/$filename");
}
}
This prevents from loading anything that is not in the DomPDF includes folder. This was the first major hurtle. Still working out some major kinks on how to display the pdf.
