generating/printing large reports

[eluser]yekibud[/eluser]
I'm almost to the finish line with my first CI application and I've ran into a hang up now that I'm dealing with a large amount of production data: Generating/Printing Large Reports.

These reports generate on the order of 400+ rows and take up about 60+ pages for printing. At first I tried generating PDFs with TCPDF, but it took way too long to create the PDFs. Then I tried just using a print stylesheet and printing from the browser - but it looks like there is a bug in FF3 that causes the browser to hang when I try to print large tables! (Works fine in IE.)

Does anybody use any other techniques for generating large formatted reports? I really don't want to have to tell my client to deal with a CSV file or use IE.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

[eluser]manilodisan[/eluser]
WE use html2ps in our HTML2PDF module. The script works pretty good. Anyways, I don't think there's a faster solution other than installing some pdf making program and than calling it via exec or something. This will assume that the host system has the program installed. Kinda weird ...

[eluser]yekibud[/eluser]
Thanks for your reply, manilodisan.

Actually I misspoke - I was using an HTML-to-PDF converter - DOMPDF - and it was too slow. So I assume HTML2PS will have the same handicap.

Yeah, executing a PDF generator on the server was something I considered a while ago. Probably going to have to do that unless I get any more ideas.

So nobody else has ever had to generate large 60+ page reports and run into issues memory/ browser printing issues?

[eluser]ldg430[/eluser]
yekibud,

if you have not found a solution yet...

i ran into the same issue (printing large reports) in my project and solved it using this

http://codeigniter.com/news/codeigniter_...deigniter/

(this is on the CI home page - right portion)

it is much faster than DOMPDF. it took me a few hours before i got my first report out. after that, all other reports are easy.

hope this helps.