As we saw in previous recipes, the user can organize content in the Pentaho solution according to his or her business needs. Let us see how this works.
For this recipe, it is important that we use an administrator role's user to be freely able to create a folder in the public folders. If the user we are using to access Pentaho with is a normal user, they can create new folders only in their home directory folders, or they must be the owner of the parent folder under which they want to create new folders.
The following steps will describe how easy it is to create a new folder in the Pentaho solution:
Go to the solution explorer and browse the solution's folder structure for the folder under which we are going to create the new folder.
As we can see in the following screenshot, select the parent folder by clicking on it. Then, from the Folder Actions menu, select New Folder….
The New Folder dialog box appears. As shown in the following screenshot, type the name of the folder we are going to create. Finally, click on OK to confirm.
The new folder we just created is displayed in the solution explorer.
After we plan the structure of our Pentaho solution, we need to define it in Pentaho. To do this, we must create a correct folder structure to fill with content items and apply correct security rules.
Creating a new folder in the Pentaho solution is a fairly easy task. Just navigate the solution looking for the parent directory; once it is located, select the parent directory and choose New Folder from the Folder Actions menu. The New Folder dialog box opens. Fill the Name field with the name of the directory we are going to create, click on the OK button, and everything is done.
Designing a good repository structure is one of the more important things to think about in order to manage it the right way in the production and with minimal effort. To obtain this result, we must carefully think about its structure during the planning phase.
Designing a good structure for our solution repository is always a good rule of thumb to let the user easily navigate the repository and quickly find out what they are looking for. Another reason to go for a reasoned design of the repository structure is to easily assign security constraints to repository content items.
There could be various ways through which we can give a proper folder structure to the content repository; an example could be to start by separating the public root folder into a set of child folders, one for each department. Then, divide any department folder by the business topic and then by content. In any case, apart from the organization strategy we choose, there are two main points we need to take care of:
The first thing to do to find out a good repository structure is to have a meeting with the system's key users and stakeholders and try to find out together which strategy would be the best one to design a reasonable repository structure. This would be a good opportunity to also discuss the security rules related to each folder in the repository.
Think about a structure that can enable the repository growth following the company growth. Companies grow dynamically over time by enabling new business units or by changing existing ones. Build a repository so that it can follow the company growth with a minimal organizational impact on how that maps on Pentaho repository.