Export

Export Feature added with v 0.8

• Difference between export and invoice
• Security and privacy
• Export state
• Adding export templates
• Adding export renderer
• Adding timesheet export renderer

The export module allows you to export filtered timesheet data into several formats.

Difference between export and invoice

There are a couple of differences in these two Kimai modules, the most important ones:

• Invoices can only be created for a dedicated customer, where an export can be created without selecting a customer
• Invoices do more calculation (e.g. tax)
• Invoices support self-created templates in more formats (e.g. XLSX, ODS, DOCX)

Security and privacy

So giving a user the permission to export data allows to see most time related data in Kimai (like customer, projects, activities, rates, time worked per user and more).

Export state

Invoices and exports share the export state, which is used to mark timesheet records as processed. These records cannot be edited any longer by regular users and are excluded by default from further invoices and exports.

You need to tick the checkbox before creating the export, to automatically set the export state on all filtered timesheet records.

For further information read the timesheet documentation.

Adding export templates

Since Kimai 1.9 you can add templates for PDF and HTML exports.

Export documents are searched in two locations:

• var/export/ - does not exist by default, please create it when you add a new template
• templates/export/renderer/ - don’t change files in here, will be overwritten with te next update

Be aware of the following rules:

• HTML templates have the file extension .html.twig
• PDF templates have the file extension .pdf.twig
• Templates are addressed by their filename
• You can use every document name only once.
  • Having var/export/default.html.twig and templates/export/renderer/default.html.twig will lead to unpredictable results
  • Use unique filenames and prefix them with your company name, eg acme-export.html.twig
• You should store your templates in var/export/, as this directory is not shipped with Kimai and not touched during updates
• You can configure different search directories through the config key kimai.export.documents if you want to add additional template source directories
• You can hide the default templates by setting the key kimai.export.defaults to an empty array / null

After you created a new or updated an existing template, you have to clear the cache to see the results:

bin/console kimai:reload --env=prod

bin/console cache:clear --env=prod
bin/console cache:warmup --env=prod

Please copy & paste one of default templates to var/export/ as starting point and rename it afterwards.

You can translate the button for your template, by adding its name to the export translation file, eg. translations/export.en.xlf. Internally for each template a new ExportRenderer service is registered, called exporter_renderer.filename_EXT_twig (see ExportServiceCompilerPass).

Adding export renderer

An export renderer is a class implementing App\Export\RendererInterface and it is responsible to convert an array of Timesheet objects into a downloadable/printable document.

Every export renderer class will be automatically available when refreshing the application cache, thanks to the
ExportServiceCompilerPass.

Each renderer is represented by a “button” below the datatable on the export screen.

A simple example, which only shows the IDs of the included timesheet records could look like this:

use App\Entity\Timesheet;
use App\Export\RendererInterface;
use App\Repository\Query\TimesheetQuery;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

final class TimesheetIdRenderer implements RendererInterface
{
    public function render(array $timesheets, TimesheetQuery $query): Response
    {
        $ids = array_map(function(Timesheet $timesheet) {
            return $timesheet->getId();
        }, $timesheets);

        $response = new Response();
        $response->setContent(sprintf('Included IDs: %s', implode(', ', $ids)));

        return $response;
    }

    public function getId(): string
    {
        return 'ext_array_dump';
    }

    public function getIcon(): string
    {
        return 'fas fa-file-code';
    }

    public function getTitle(): string
    {
        return 'Show IDs';
    }
}

All you need to do is to register it as a service in the Symfony DI container.

Adding timesheet export renderer

Feature available since 1.6

Timesheet exporter (implementing the interface App\Export\TimesheetExportInterface) are almost the same as export renderer, except that they don’t have the methods getIcon() and getTitle().

If you already wrote an export renderer, all you need to add is the second interface and you can export the filtered data from the user and admin timesheet screen.

Be aware, that you should add more permission (eg. view_rate_own_timesheet) checks to these renderer, as they are available for every user!