Generating a PDF

There comes a time when you'll want to create a PDF document in many applications. In this recipe, we'll look at how to output some content in a PDF document.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll use a plugin called CakePdf, which can be found at https://github.com/ceeram/CakePdf.

The contents of this plugin should be added to app/Plugin/CakePdf/ and loaded by the application. To do so, add the following code to your bootstrap.php file located in app/Config/:

CakePlugin::load('CakePdf', array(
  'bootstrap' => true,
  'routes' => true
));

Then, we need a controller to generate a PDF document. Create a file named ReportsController.php in app/Controller/, and introduce the following content:

<?php
App::uses('AppController', 'Controller');

class ReportsController extends AppController {
}

Then, we'll set up some configuration options for the plugin. The most important of all is the PDF engine we want to use, as the plugin provides a few. For this example, we'll use dompdf...