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

Chapter 5. Adding a Relational Data Source

In this chapter, we will create a copy of the report created in the previous chapter and modify it so that it takes its data from a relational source. We will explain what JDBC is, what a JDBC driver is, and how it is used.

The topics we will be covering in the chapter include the following:

  • Downloading the JDBC driver for MySQL and copying it inside Pentaho Report Designer (PRD)

  • Using the UI to create/edit JDBC-type data sets and creating a JDBC connection to our sakila database, with its corresponding SQL query

  • Modifying the following sections: Report Header, Group Header, Details Header, and Details Footer; we will configure the last two to be repeated on each page

  • Deleting certain objects from the report, adding some new ones, and modifying others so that they all correspond to our new data source

  • Aggregation functions, explaining the most used ones; we will add a new function into our report and use its output in order to modify the style of a...