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

Time for action – adding functions


We will add a function to color the rows in an alternating manner, differentiating between the even and odd rows, just as they appear in the finished report.

  1. In the Data tab, we right-click on Functions, and in the drop-down menu, we select the Add Functions... option.

  2. Now we will see the following window:

  3. This window contains all of the functions that we can create in PRD grouped into categories. In this case, we choose the Row Banding function in the Report category and click on OK to create it:

  4. Next, we configure its name, background color, and the name of the element/object that the function will be applied to:

    • Function Name = RowBanding

    • Active Banding Color = #ccff66

    • Apply Element(s) Named = oddEvenRowBanding

    • Now that the function has been defined, we can apply it

  5. In the Structure tab, navigate to Master Report | Group | Details Body | Details:

  6. In this tab, we configure the following:

    • Attributes.name = oddEvenRowBanding

    This will apply the oddEvenRowBanding...