PHP and COM
If you are an adventurer and you are running PHP on a Windows system using CGI, ISAPI, or Apache module version, you can also get the COM function of the system. Now, the work of explaining COM (Microsoft's Component Object Model) is left to Microsoft and those big books to do. However, there is nothing wrong with knowing COM, below is a small snippet of ordinary (no puns, very ordinary) code.
This small piece of code uses PHP to start Microsoft Word in the background, open a new file, type some text, save the file and then close the application:
<?
// create a reference to a new COM component (Word)
$word = new COM("") or die("Can't start Word!");
// print the version of Word that's now in use
echo "Loading Word, v. {$word->Version}<br>";
// set the visibility of the application to 0 (false)
// to open the application in the forefront, use 1 (true)
$word->Visible = 0;
// create a new document in Word
$word->Documents->Add();
// add text to the new document
$word->Selection->TypeText("Testing 1-2-3...");
//save the document in the Windows temp directory
$word->Documents[1]->SaveAs("/Windows/temp/");
// close the connection to the COM component
$word->Quit();
// print another message to the screen
echo "Check for the file...";
?>
Suppose you are running an intranet web site that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database, and your users need data in Excel format. Then, you can ask PHP to execute the necessary SQL queries and format the output results, then start Excel with COM, transfer the data to it, and finally store the files to the user's desktop system.
If you are an adventurer and you are running PHP on a Windows system using CGI, ISAPI, or Apache module version, you can also get the COM function of the system. Now, the work of explaining COM (Microsoft's Component Object Model) is left to Microsoft and those big books to do. However, there is nothing wrong with knowing COM, below is a small snippet of ordinary (no puns, very ordinary) code.
This small piece of code uses PHP to start Microsoft Word in the background, open a new file, type some text, save the file and then close the application:
<?
// create a reference to a new COM component (Word)
$word = new COM("") or die("Can't start Word!");
// print the version of Word that's now in use
echo "Loading Word, v. {$word->Version}<br>";
// set the visibility of the application to 0 (false)
// to open the application in the forefront, use 1 (true)
$word->Visible = 0;
// create a new document in Word
$word->Documents->Add();
// add text to the new document
$word->Selection->TypeText("Testing 1-2-3...");
//save the document in the Windows temp directory
$word->Documents[1]->SaveAs("/Windows/temp/");
// close the connection to the COM component
$word->Quit();
// print another message to the screen
echo "Check for the file...";
?>
Suppose you are running an intranet web site that stores data in a Microsoft SQL Server database, and your users need data in Excel format. Then, you can ask PHP to execute the necessary SQL queries and format the output results, then start Excel with COM, transfer the data to it, and finally store the files to the user's desktop system.