Compliance reporting for OHS training platforms sounds like a data export problem until you look at the data model. ActiveOHS tracks training completions, certifications, expiry dates, and regulatory requirements across four separate custom post types, all connected through ACF relational fields. When an enterprise client needs a compliance report for a ministry audit or corporate HSE review, the data they need lives in four different tables with no single query that touches all of it.
I built the credential export plugin to solve that in a single pass.
The plugin traverses the full relational chain in one query sequence: employee records link to completions, completions link to courses, courses link to certifications, certifications link to regulatory standards. All four relationship layers resolve in a single structured query pass rather than n+1 lookups per employee. For platforms with hundreds of employees and dozens of active certifications per person, the difference between a lazy relational traversal and a structured single-pass query is the difference between a report that runs in seconds and one that times out.
The output is a 26-column CSV built to what Canadian OHS regulators actually ask for during audits: employee name and ID, course title and provider, completion date, certification type, expiry date, regulatory standard, and compliance status per standard. The column structure was built from the ActiveOHS client's specific reporting requirements under Ontario OHS regulation. It generates directly to the browser as a downloadable file - no intermediate storage, no temporary files, no page reload.
Access is gated behind a WordPress capability check. Only users with the right role can trigger an export. The export action runs through a nonce-verified admin request so the URL cannot be triggered by an unauthenticated crawl or cached page load.
For OHS platform operators, HR systems, or any WordPress-based compliance tool that needs structured data extraction from complex ACF relational models, this plugin pattern - single-pass relational traversal into a formatted CSV with proper access control - is directly transferable to other regulatory domains.