Book Image

Learning Pentaho CTools

By : Miguel Gaspar
Book Image

Learning Pentaho CTools

By: Miguel Gaspar

Overview of this book

Pentaho and CTools are two of the fastest and most rapidly growing tools for practical solutions not found in any other tool available on the market. Using Pentaho allows you to build a complete analytics solution, and CTools brings an advanced flexibility to customizing them in a remarkable way. CTools provides its users with the ability to utilize Web technologies and data visualization concepts, and make the most of best practices to create a huge visual impact. The book starts with the basics of the framework and how to get data to your dashboards. We'll take you all the way through to create your custom and advanced dashboards that will create an effective visual impact and provide the best user experience. You will be given deep insights into the lifecycle of dashboards and the working of various components. Further, you will create a custom dashboard using the Community Dashboards Editor and use datasources to load data on the components. You will also create custom content using Query, the Freeform Addins Popup, and text components. Next, you will make use of widgets to create similar sections and duplicate components to reproduce other components on a dashboard. You will then learn to build a plugin without writing Java code, use Sparkl as a CPK plugin manager, and understand the application of deployment and version control to dashboard development. Finally, you will learn tips and tricks that can be very useful while embedding dashboards into other applications. This guide is an invaluable tutorial if you are planning to use custom and advanced dashboards among the solutions that you are building with Pentaho.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Pentaho CTools
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using components inside the dashboards


We have not really covered the concept of a dashboard if we do not show any Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), charts, tables, and so on. CDF provides many components we can use to create the dashboard. To use them, we just need to extend the code we used previously. You saw that we need to include the modules we will need. Each component is a module that has its own dependencies that will be loaded automatically when we include the component.

The previous example shows the code that should be placed inside the XCDF file. This code creates a dashboard with a simple text component that returns a simple Hello World! message.

If you look at the code, you will find that we are including the dashboard module and also the component module. You will see that we are already using the Bootstrap framework. For this case, we are also including cdf/components/TextComponent, the module that makes it possible to use a text component, one of the simplest components...