Day 9 – Exporting Forecast Reports to CSV and PDF in Laravel #SalesForecastAI #LaravelPDFExport #CSVReport #ForecastReporting #SalesAnalytics

Today we’ll add CSV and PDF export features so that your AI-powered forecast and insights can be easily shared with management or archived for reporting.

Table of Contents

📦 Step 1: Create ForecastExport class for CSV

php artisan make:export ForecastExport --model=ForecastResult

In app/Exports/ForecastExport.php:

namespace App\Exports;

use App\Models\ForecastResult;
use Maatwebsite\Excel\Concerns\FromCollection;
use Maatwebsite\Excel\Concerns\WithHeadings;

class ForecastExport implements FromCollection, WithHeadings
{
    public function collection()
    {
        return ForecastResult::select('forecast_date', 'yhat', 'yhat_lower', 'yhat_upper')->get();
    }

    public function headings(): array
    {
        return ['Forecast Date', 'Predicted Sales', 'Lower Bound', 'Upper Bound'];
    }
}

📂 Step 2: Add CSV export route

In web.php:

use App\Exports\ForecastExport;
use Maatwebsite\Excel\Facades\Excel;

Route::get('/forecast/export/csv', function () {
    return Excel::download(new ForecastExport, 'forecast_report.csv');
})->name('forecast.export.csv');

🧾 Step 3: Create Blade view for PDF

Create resources/views/forecast/pdf.blade.php:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Forecast Report</title>
    <style>
        table { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 12px; }
        th, td { border: 1px solid #ddd; padding: 6px; text-align: center; }
        th { background-color: #f2f2f2; }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <h2>AI-Powered 30-Day Forecast Report</h2>

    <table>
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <th>Date</th>
                <th>Predicted</th>
                <th>Lower</th>
                <th>Upper</th>
            </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
            @foreach($data as $row)
                <tr>
                    <td>{{ $row->forecast_date }}</td>
                    <td>{{ number_format($row->yhat, 2) }}</td>
                    <td>{{ number_format($row->yhat_lower, 2) }}</td>
                    <td>{{ number_format($row->yhat_upper, 2) }}</td>
                </tr>
            @endforeach
        </tbody>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

🧾 Step 4: Install and use DomPDF

composer require barryvdh/laravel-dompdf

Add route in web.php:

Route::get('/forecast/export/pdf', function () {
    $data = \App\Models\ForecastResult::orderBy('forecast_date')->get();
    $pdf = \PDF::loadView('forecast.pdf', compact('data'));
    return $pdf->download('forecast_report.pdf');
})->name('forecast.export.pdf');

🖱 Step 5: Add export buttons in Blade

In resources/views/sales/index.blade.php:

<div class="flex gap-4 mt-4">
    <a href="{{ route('forecast.export.csv') }}" class="bg-green-500 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded">Export CSV</a>
    <a href="{{ route('forecast.export.pdf') }}" class="bg-red-500 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded">Download PDF</a>
</div>

✅ Output:

forecast_report.csv contains tabular forecast data
forecast_report.pdf has a print-ready report for business use

✅ Up next (Day 10): we’ll wrap the project with dashboard cleanup, authentication, and final deployment prep.

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