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    Slow inefficient document merging
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    Posted by nicks  · 22-11-2012 - 14:10

    Hi All,

    I'm working to use PHPDOCX as a way to create Word documents on the fly rather than the previous painful method of using an XSLT template and combining it with XML generated output (truly horrible!), and it is proving very useful, however I've now hit upon a performance issue with this technique.

    I've been using MergeDocx and also the AddTemplateVariable methods to build a single word document using 10s to 100s of other smaller template documents (mainly pre-formatted tables). This functionally works fine, though seems very inefficient as I'm having to merge a document, write it to the file system before opening it and adding it as a template.

    A snip of code below:

    $time_start = microtime(true);
    $docx = new DocxUtilities();
    $options = array('mergeType' => 1);
    $docx->mergeDocx($TMP_FileExt, 'A.docx', $TMP_FileExt, $options);
    if ($_GET['Debug'] == 1)
    {
    $time_end = microtime(true);
    $time = $time_end - $time_start;
    echo "Merging Report [" . round($time,4) . "s]<BR/ >";
    }
    $time_start = microtime(true);
    $docx = new CreateDocx();
    $docx->addTemplate($TMP_FileExt);
    $docx->addTemplateVariable('PS_IP', $X);
    $docx->addTemplateVariable($PSData, 'table', array('header' => false));
    $docx->clearBlocks(); //We clean any remaining block tags
    $docx->createDocx($TMP_File);
    $PSData = array();
    if ($_GET['Debug'] == 1)
    {
    $time_end = microtime(true);
    $time = $time_end - $time_start;
    echo "Writing to Report [" . round($time,4) . "s]<BR/ >";
    }

    I've added a timer in to see how long the processing is taking, and we are talking about 0.5 of second on average, as a result when combining 100s of small template documents it soon mounts up!

    I may well have missing a useful method/trick, though there doesn't seem to be a way of working with documents in memory which I assume should be a lot quicker?

    Many thanks in advance.

    Thanks,

    Nick