Comments on: PEAR and CakePHP

By: cartosys

cartosys — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:21:17 +0000

per francis’s problem: Hi, Im trying to make this work.. Im getting an error which says, “Warning (2): require_once(Console/Getopt.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory [CORE/vendors/Pear/System.php, line 21]“

My solution was to comment out line 21 in System.php. I did the “modify the core files” nono, but don’t know what other solution to take…

By: Francis

Francis — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:27:05 +0000

saw what the problem is.. no problem with your steps.. it had an issue with something that i set to my view in my beforeFilter function.

By: stephen

stephen — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:23:52 +0000

All the steps I did are listed out here. I modified one step, but I called that out in the post, and highlighted it. When I get a spreadsheet full of special characters, that usually means that there was an error somewhere in the code that I needed to go back and correct.

By: Francis

Francis — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:55:05 +0000

i just followed what you did here.. are there any extra steps to be done?

By: stephen

stephen — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:01:47 +0000

With the special characters, what are you trying to output, and are you sure that you are sending the data out in UTF-8? Microsoft Excel usually tries to do what it thinks is best, which is most of the time wrong. So make sure the encoding is correct.

Also, if there is an error in the logic before it outputs, like calling a variable that is not there, it could send out an error, and send special characters.

By: Francis

Francis — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:26:49 +0000

Hi, its me again.. I was able to make it work.. it generates the excel file but then the contents of the worksheet isnt right.. its full of special characters..

help please?

By: Francis

Francis — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:54:54 +0000

Hi, Im trying to make this work.. Im getting an error which says, “Warning (2): require_once(Console/Getopt.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory [CORE/vendors/Pear/System.php, line 21]“

By: stephen

stephen — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:25:06 +0000

Chris, I like the approach. You are correct in that in a true MVC approach, it should be in the view. Since my approach was just for 1 report, it clogs the controller only a little, but I still ought to change this around according to your suggestion.

Maybe, to be even cleaner in the view, we could take the Excel object, put it in a helper, with certain functions, so that the excel writer will have its code in a central place and called in various views to build different excel reports.

Great suggestion Chris.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:18:16 +0000

Hi again Stephen… figured I’d update you on this since I found your post so helpful.

I’ve been working with this and found what I believe is a more “cake like” or more “true” MVC method of rendering the view for the excel spreadsheet. I am building a reporting system for my app and I soon found my “reports” controller was getting really full of many functions to create the various spreadsheets. I figured that really the spreadsheet exports are actually views so the code for constructing them should be in a view file.

This is what I’ve done:

1) Copied the empty ajax.ctp layout from ./cake/libs/view/layouts/ into ./app/views/layouts/ and renamed it excel.ctp.

2) Used $this->layout and $this->render in the controller to send requests for reports (i.e. the excel spreadsheets) to a specific view file using the “excel” layout. For example:

// either export to excel or show the normal view
if ($export != ‘export’) {
$this->render(‘report_name’);
} else {
$this->layout = ‘excel’;
$this->render(‘report_name_export’);
}

In my case I have the “report_name.ctp” view which shows the report on screen normally and the “report_name_export.ctp” view which exports the report to excel using the method you described.

Each “export” view must include the line to import the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer library:

App::import(‘vendor’, ‘Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer’, array(‘file’ => ‘../vendors/Pear/Spreadsheet/Excel/Writer.php’

(I tried to put this in the excel.ctp layout but it didn’t seem to work, no idea why)

This makes it much cleaner IMO and for me at least it’s much easier to work with every export in the individual view file rather than clogging up my controller!

Best wishes
Chris

By: stephen

stephen — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:51:50 +0000

I have updated the post with the include_path information so that there is no need to edit the PEAR library files.