Printing to file from web controller, and from shell batch

I have some functionality that I'm currently migrating from CodeIgniter 1.7.3 to CakePHP 2.2.3, and I'm wondering how best to tackle a particular scenario.

The currently functionality that I'm migrating reads data from the database, and will generate a PDF file via FPDF.  

Currently, I have a controller that will give an option to print to screen, or print to file. In both cases, the controller action will access the model to get the information it needs for printing, and then will call render('print') to generate the PDF.  The printToFile action will pass a file name which will indicate to FPDF to output to a file, rather than stream to the browser.

The print view calls an element, passing the data and filename, to actually generate the PDF.

Now, I have a different controller, that will probably be migrated to a shell or task (since it is run from the command line), that wants to call the print to file functionality, but I'm not sure how to arrange it.  I've generally felt that one controller calling the functionality of another controller is bad form, so I'm looking for ideas.  One possibility is to call the element functionality directly, from the controller(/shell/task), but that may not be such a good idea, either.

In CodeIgniter, I had a library function that I would call from the controller that would use FPDF directly.

Can any give me some pointers on calling View functionality repeated from a batch (whether it be from a Controller, as it is at the moment, or a Shell/Task, as it may end up getting migrated to)?  Keeping in mind that PDF generation is not the only thing that the batch files does, so control needs to be passed back to the batch file at some point, to keep processing.

Regards

Reuben Helms

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