Best way to dynamically create Word doc

[reefoid]

I have a client with reports running on their intranet. These are produced using PHP to connect to the FoxPro backend. They're now wanting to be able to dynamically create Word documents from some of this data, specifically they want to generate client letters for quotation work on the system.

Ideally I'd like to have a template doc that will contain variables that can then be replaced with values from the database. The document should then be saved to the server with a unique name.

I've taken a look around and there seem to be several ways to achieve this. Does anyone here have experience of this and be able to recommend the best method?

I was looking at phpdocx which looks good, but its $90 for the version that supports templates and I'm reluctant to part with that without trying it first to ensure it meets my needs. Any other alternatives?

Don't mind coding it myself if that's needed but I'm hoping there is something already out there (free preferably!!) that can do this.

Thanks.

 

[reefoid]

Yeah, I tried that. Only issue is that whenever someone tries to open the doc it asks to convert the file and you need to select HTML Document, I can live with that but my client won't like it. Also, images are not saved into the document.

 

[reefoid]

Yes, have the following:

header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-word");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment;Filename=document_name.doc");

So it saves as a .doc but Word asks to convert each time its opened. I'll look into it a bit further to find out why.

Cheers.

 

[reefoid]

Thanks for all your suggestions guys, most helpful and pointed me in some new directions. In the end I've used PHPWord, seems to do everything I need and very simple to setup. Still in beta but seems stable enough.