[Chartjs]-Laravel PDF generation with Graph and send it with Email

Kind of a big question, but I’ll try to answer

1. I think it’s good. I’m not a big fan of using JavaScript to create charts, but that’s me. You obviously know what you’re doing and PDF generation is in my experience a “If it works, please don’t break it” functionality.

2. I think this might be more difficult. Since you’re using JavaScript to create charts, you need some kind of engine (NodeJS comes to mind) to parse the JavaScript and actually create your charts without opening a browser and doing it manually. (This is why I don’t like using JavaScript to create charts). You could take a look at tutorials like this one to get an idea of how to render your charts serverside.

   After that, you can take a look at the Laravel task scheduler (provided you’re on Laravel 5, a community package exists for Laravel 4). You can schedule existing and custom-made commands to be executed. In pseudo-code, a PDF generation command could look like this:

   public function createAndSendCharts() {
   
       // 1. Get necessary user data
       // 2. Create your charts
       // 3. Save your charts
       // 4. Create email with charts
       // 5. Send your email
   
   } 
   

   You could then add that function to your Task Scheduler

   $schedule->command('send:charts')
            ->monthly();
   

Hope this was of some help. All in all, you’re doing fine, but the choice for ChartJS has some consequences if you want to automate the whole process. Nothing really special, tons of tutorials exist for this situation 🙂