phpmailer attach pdf from dynamic url

Question

I'm sending an email using phpmailer. I have web service to generate pdf. This pdf is not uploading or downloading to anywhere.

PDF url is like

http://mywebsite/webservices/report/sales_invoice.php?company=development&sale_id=2

I need to attach this dynamic pdf url to my email. My email sending service url is like

http://mywebsite/webservices/mailservices/sales_email.php

Below is the code which i am using to attach the pdf.

$pdf_url = "../report/sales_invoice.php?company=development&sale_id=2";
$mail->AddAttachment($pdf_url);

Sending message is working but pdf doesn't attached. It gives below message.

Could not access file: ../report/sales_invoice.php?company=development&sale_id=2

I need some help

Answer 1

To have the answer right here:

As phpmailer would not auto-fetch the remote content, you need to do it yourself.

So you go:

// we can use file_get_contents to fetch binary data from a remote location
$url = 'http://mywebsite/webservices/report/sales_invoice.php?company=development&sale_id=2';
$binary_content = file_get_contents($url);

// You should perform a check to see if the content
// was actually fetched. Use the === (strict) operator to
// check $binary_content for false.
if ($binary_content === false) {
   throw new Exception("Could not fetch remote content from: '$url'");
}

// $mail must have been created
$mail->AddStringAttachment($binary_content, "sales_invoice.pdf", $encoding = 'base64', $type = 'application/pdf');

// continue building your mail object...

Some other things to watch out for:

Depending on the server response time, your script might run into timing issues. Also, the fetched data might be pretty large and could cause php to exceed its memory allocation.