Book Image

Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example: Beginner's Guide

By : Mariano, GARCIA MATTIO
Book Image

Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example: Beginner's Guide

By: Mariano, GARCIA MATTIO

Overview of this book

Open source reporting tools and techniques, such as PRD, have been comparable in quality to their commercial counterparts this is largely due to the market's marked tendency to choose open source solutions. PRD is a very powerful tool and in order to take full advantage of it you need to pay attention to the important details. Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example: Beginner's Guide clearly explains the the foundation and then puts those concepts into practice through step-by-step visual guides. Feeling confident with your newly discovered, desirable, skill you will have the power to create your very own professional reports including graphics, formulas, sub-reports and many other forms of data reporting.Pentaho 5.0 Reporting By Example: Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step guide to create high quality, professional reports. Starting with the basics we will explore each feature to ensure a thorough understanding to peel back the curtain and take full advantage of the power that Pentaho puts at our fingertips. This book gives you the necessary resources to create a great variety of reports. You will be able to make reports that contain sub-reports, include graphics, sparklines and so on. You will also be able to parameterize your reports so that the final user can decide what information to visualize. You will be able to create your own stoplight type indicators and drill down in your reports. and execute your reports from your own web application. Pentaho 5.0 Reporting By Example: Beginner's Guide lets you learn everything necessary to work seriously with one of the world's most popular open source reporting tools. This book will guide you chapter by chapter through examples, graphics, and theoretical explanations so that you feel comfortable interacting with Pentaho Report Designer and creating your own reports.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Pentaho 5.0 Reporting by Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Trying out stylesheets


To try out the stylesheets we just created, run them through PRD, whose default user is Designer, and from the Pentaho BA Server, logging in with the user Admin.

Then, on one hand, preview the report in PRD.

On the other hand, publish the report in Pentaho BA Server, in the same folder where we published previous reports. When asked if you want to execute the report now, click on the Yes option.

In the following screenshot we have placed the results of the two executions of the report side by side for comparison. On the left is the report executed in Pentaho BA Server, and on the right is the report executed in PRD:

If we review the CSS rules that we have defined, we can see that we have done an important job using environment variables and stylesheets.

Next, we will talk about another new feature in Pentaho Report Designer: Crosstabs!

Learning about crosstabs

A crosstab is a table where we can analyze and compare the relationship of the results of two or more study variables...