majorsilence / reporting

v27.0.0-alpha.11 2026-11-11 19:17 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.1

Requires (Dev)

• phpunit/phpunit: ^10.5

Suggests

• ext-ffi: Required by MajorsilenceReporting\ReportNative and RdlLibrary for in-process rendering; not needed for Report or ReportAot (subprocess-based).

MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD-2-Clause

• Peter Gill

• excel
• spreadsheet
• csv
• pdf
• html
• reporting
• rtf
• tiff
• native
• pdf generation
• business intelligence
• dotnet
• rdl
• ffi
• data export
• report generation

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-11-11 19:20 UTC

README

Three wrappers are provided for generating reports from PHP. Pick the one that matches how you deploy the reporting engine:

Wrapper	Mechanism	Requires
MajorsilenceReporting\Report	subprocess → RdlCmd (.NET DLL)	.NET runtime on the host
MajorsilenceReporting\ReportAot	subprocess → RdlCmd (self-contained or AOT binary)	nothing extra
MajorsilenceReporting\ReportNative	in-process FFI → rdlnative shared library	PHP FFI extension

PHP 8.1 or later is required (constructor property promotion and str_contains/str_starts_with are used throughout).

Setup

Install PHP

• Linux (Debian/Ubuntu):

  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y php php-cli
  php --version

• macOS (via Homebrew):

  brew install php
  php --version

• Windows — download from windows.php.net or use winget:

  winget install PHP.PHP
  php --version

Install via Composer (recommended)

Add this package to your project from Packagist:

composer require majorsilence/reporting

Then autoload in your script:

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

ext-ffi is only needed if you use ReportNative/RdlLibrary — Report and ReportAot work with a stock PHP install.

Developing this repo

Clone the repo and install its own dependencies (adds phpunit/phpunit for the test suite):

composer install

Manual install (no Composer)

require_once '/path/to/reporting-php/src/Report.php';
require_once '/path/to/reporting-php/src/ReportAot.php';
// or
require_once '/path/to/reporting-php/src/ReportNative.php';

Option 1 — Report (subprocess, .NET runtime required)

Use this when you have the .NET runtime installed on the host and want to run RdlCmd.dll through dotnet.

use MajorsilenceReporting\Report;

$rpt = new Report(
    reportPath:  '/path/to/report.rdl',
    rdlCmdPath:  '/path/to/RdlCmd.dll',
    dotnetPath:  'dotnet',          // omit on Windows when using a native exe
);
$rpt->set_connection_string('Data Source=/path/to/northwindEF.db');
$rpt->set_parameter('Country', 'Germany');

// Export to a file
$rpt->export('pdf', '/tmp/output.pdf');

// Export to memory (binary string for pdf/tif/rtf; text string for csv/html/xml)
$data = $rpt->export_to_memory('pdf');

Windows

$rpt = new Report(
    reportPath: 'C:\\reports\\report.rdl',
    rdlCmdPath: 'C:\\RdlCmd\\RdlCmd.exe',
);

Option 2 — ReportAot (subprocess, no runtime required)

Use this with an AOT-compiled or self-contained RdlCmd binary. No dotnetPath — the binary runs directly.

Download the appropriate binary from the release:

• majorsilence-reporting-rdlcmd-aot-linux.zip → linux-x64/ or linux-arm64/
• majorsilence-reporting-rdlcmd-aot-osx.zip → osx-x64/ or osx-arm64/
• majorsilence-reporting-rdlcmd-aot-windows.zip → win-x64/ or win-arm64/

Or use the self-contained (non-AOT) build from majorsilence-reporting-rdlcmd-self-contained.zip.

use MajorsilenceReporting\ReportAot;

$rpt = new ReportAot(
    reportPath: '/path/to/report.rdl',
    rdlCmdPath: '/path/to/RdlCmd',  // RdlCmd.exe on Windows
);
$rpt->set_connection_string('Data Source=/path/to/northwindEF.db');
$rpt->set_parameter('Country', 'Germany');

$rpt->export('pdf', '/tmp/output.pdf');
$data = $rpt->export_to_memory('xlsx');

On Linux/macOS, make the binary executable:

chmod +x /path/to/RdlCmd

Option 3 — ReportNative (in-process FFI, no subprocess)

Use this for the lowest overhead: the reporting engine runs inside the PHP process via the FFI extension. No subprocess is spawned.

Enable the FFI extension

; php.ini
extension=ffi
ffi.enable=true

Load the library

Download the native shared library from the release (majorsilence-reporting-rdlnative-linux.zip, -osx.zip, or -windows.zip).

Platform	Library filename
Linux	librdlnative.so
macOS	librdlnative.dylib
Windows	rdlnative.dll

Keep the .NET runtime's sibling libraries (libSkiaSharp.so, libe_sqlite3.so, ...) in the same directory as librdlnative.so; they are found from there automatically.

Do not set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the rdlnative directory. It is not needed, and with rdlnative 27.0.0-alpha.11 it makes PHP crash with a segmentation fault the first time a report opens a SQLite database. On Linux, SkiaSharp also needs libfontconfig1 (e.g. apt-get install libfontconfig1).

use MajorsilenceReporting\RdlLibrary;
use MajorsilenceReporting\ReportNative;

// Load once per process
$lib = RdlLibrary::load('/path/to/librdlnative.so');

$rpt = new ReportNative($lib, '/path/to/report.rdl');
$rpt->set_connection_string('Data Source=/path/to/northwindEF.db');
$rpt->set_parameter('Country', 'Germany');

// Export to a file
$rpt->export('pdf', '/tmp/output.pdf');

// Export to memory — returns raw binary string for binary formats
$data = $rpt->export_to_memory('pdf');

Supported export formats

Format	Description	Report	ReportAot / ReportNative
pdf	PDF (default)	✓	✓
csv	Comma-separated values	✓	✓
xlsx	Excel workbook	✓	✓
xlsx_table	Excel workbook (table style)		✓
xml	XML	✓	✓
rtf	Rich Text Format	✓	✓
tif	TIFF image	✓	✓
tifb	TIFF image (black & white)		✓
html	HTML	✓	✓
mht	MHTML		✓

An unrecognised format string defaults to pdf.

Running the tests

The test suite (tests/ReportNativeTest.php, PHPUnit) covers ReportNative. It requires a published rdlnative shared library and is skipped automatically if RDLNATIVE_LIB is not set.

# Build the native library first (from the main Reporting repo)
dotnet publish RdlNative -c Release-DrawingCompat -r linux-x64 -f net10.0 \
    --self-contained true -p:PublishAot=true \
    -o /tmp/rdlnative-pub

# Run tests
export RDLNATIVE_LIB=/tmp/rdlnative-pub/librdlnative.so
export REPORTING_REPO_ROOT=/path/to/Reporting
composer test

On macOS replace linux-x64 with osx-arm64 (or osx-x64) and librdlnative.so with librdlnative.dylib.

Examples

See the Examples/ subdirectory for runnable scripts:

• test1.php — basic PDF export to file
• test2-connection-string-parameter.php — connection string and report parameters
• test3-streaming.php — exporting to memory for streaming HTTP responses

Releasing (maintainers)

This package is published on Packagist. Packagist has no build/upload step -- it reads versions directly from git tags via a GitHub webhook (configured once on the Packagist package page). To cut a release:

git tag vX.Y.Z -m "Release vX.Y.Z"
git push origin vX.Y.Z

Packagist picks up the new tag automatically within a few minutes via the webhook. If it doesn't, click "Update" on the package page, or check Settings -> Webhooks on GitHub.