This article aims to help those who like myself wondered how to make text wrap within a table cell using FPDF to generate a the PDF. A few posts around the web seem to have missed the point that wrapping comes out of the box in FPDF using the MultiCell function. However, it’s just a tiny bit tricky but not prohibitively so. So, this is what we are aiming for - an invoice.

There are 2 examples of wrapping here. Firstly the client address is wrapped, and secondly the first row of the line item data has a wrapped description.

View the PDF here

In both cases the MultiCell in-built function is used. Before I had this solution working I was using the Cell function. In that case, long text simply continued through to the next cell ‘Quantity’. In the case of Cell, you can simply output a series of calls to the function with a cell width and so fourth and the cells will line up against each other on the same line.

When I switched to MultiCell for the first cell of each row only, I found that it would cause all subsequent cells in the same row to wrap to the next line. Therefore my solution was to use the SetXY function to reposition the ‘cursor’ back to where the 2nd cell of the current row would normally be, and then proceed to use Cell calls.

In order to do that it’s a case of marking the current X and Y coordinates of the cursor prior to entering the line item loop and calling SetXY just after the 1st cell MultiCell function call. That solved the line wrapping issue and my text wrapped inside the first cell - great.

The second issue however is that the MultiCell is arbitrarily high depending on the amount of text wrapping going on. I had been provided a static height to my Cell calls as as such they were now out of line with the first column, that is, the text and border lines were all out of sync with the 1st column.

To solve that problem it was a case of grabbing the Y coordinate of the cursor before and immediately after the MultiCell call, finding the difference to ascertain the height of the cell, and then using this to size the height of the remaining Cell calls on the row.

Source Code

Please feel free to download the source code for this article which builds the invoice PDF as described.

The source code is provided as a ZIP file with index.php and InvoicePDF.class.php. You will need to obtain the FPDF library yourself and modify the index.php include file locations.

Best of luck!

If you like coding PHP the OOP way then you will often find yourself in the arduous position of needing to populate your object attributes (member variables) from database row data. And you do this again and again and again, and you find it all rather repetitive, which it is. And you don’t fancy looking at an object relational mapping solution for now, but promise yourself you will “Another Time”.

Here it is;

This code relies on a number of assumptions. These are, but are probably not limited to;

1. The data parameter to the constructor is an associative array, depicting a row from the database. 
2. That the database column names are lowercase, and separated by underscores, e.g. the_column_name
3. Your attributes will be in camel casing as governed by the db2Camel function
4. Your attributes will be public as they do not benefit from an explicit declaration of access scope such as private or protected.
5. You will access the attributes direct on the object, not through get accessors, e.g. $obj->theAttribute
6. A programmer would not know the attributes that an object contained from reading the code, they would need to understand the constructor’s function and consult the database column names to infer the attribute names.

If you are happy with all those assumptions, then this code might just prove quite handy in expediating the process of population of PHP object attributes dynamically from a database.