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

Parameters


Parameters enable the final user to interact with the contents of the report, allowing the reports to present dynamically generated content and adapt to the needs of the user.

Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) allows the inclusion of parameters in its reports by means of a fairly nice UI. Parameters in PRD can be quite simple, such as the selection of a value from a list, or more complex, such as when nested parameters are created so that setting a value in one of them causes the modification of the values of others. This means that the data set obtained by the nested parameter depends on the values selected in another parameter. In the first case we could establish a list containing every year in which films were rented, and have the user select one of them:

In the second example, we could create two parameters so that one of them holds every country, and the other one holds every city available, and have them behave in a way such that when the user selects a country, the other parameter...