Introduction

Tabular is a PHP library for generating table data structures (e.g. an invoice, a report) from an XML data source using expressions, self-reference and more.

It allows you to:

• Define a configuration which dynamically creates table rows composed of cells.
• Evaluate values dynamically using extended XPath expressions.
• Use tokens in expressions, literal values and cell names, and iterate over sets of items.
• Assign rows (or sets of rows) to groups, which can be targeted in subsequent passes.
• Format cells using pre-configured and custom formatters.
• Define parameters which can be passed at the time of generation.

It accepts a source XML document and a Tabular JSON definition file, it gives back an XML file structured as a table which can then be used in anyway you would like.

Why?

You could generate complex tabular data only with PHP, but beyond a certain threshold this results in a nightmare of variables and spaghetti code.

You could do generate reports with XSLT transformations, but I think this is hugely verbose and detached from the familiar PHP environment.

How?

The central concept is the definition file:

{
    "rows": [
        {
            "cells": [
                {
                    "name": "title",
                    "expr": "string(./title)"
                },
                {
                    "name": "price",
                    "expr": "number(./price)"
                }
            ],
            "with_query": "//book"
        },
        {
            "cells": [
                {
                    "name": "price",
                    "expr": "sum(//price)"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

The above definition will generate a table representation in XML with a row for each <book/> element in the given XML file and provide an additional row showing the sum of all the <price/> elements of the <book/> element.

So given the following XML file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<store>
    <book>
        <title>War and Peace</title>
        <price>5.00</price>
    </book>
    <book>
        <title>One Hundered Years of Soliture</title>
        <price>7</price>
    </book>
</store>

The generated table might look like this (as rendered by the Tabular CLI):

┌────────────────────────────────┬───────┐
│ title                          │ price │
├────────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ War and Peace                  │ 5     │
│ One Hundered Years of Soliture │ 7     │
│                                │ 12    │
└────────────────────────────────┴───────┘

The necessary code is as follows:

<?php

use PhpBench\Tabular\Tabular;

$dom = new DomDocument('1.0');
$dom->load('books.xml');

// report.json contains the above JSON definition
$tableDom = Tabular::getInstance()->tabulate($dom, 'report.json');
````

We can then either iterate the table data with an XPath query:

.. code-block:: php
foreach ($tableDom->xpath()->query('//row') as $rowEl) {
    foreach ($tableDom->xpath()->query('.//cell', $rowEl) as $cellEl) {
        $value = $cellEl->nodeValue;
    }
}

or dump it as an array

<?php

$rows = $tableDom->toArray();