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

Summary


By reading this chapter, you learned about using selectors on a dashboard built with CDE. You should know which components are the most useful and are used to filter data in the dashboard, which does not mean that you can use only components from the selectors group. You will see in the next two chapters that we can also use a table, a chart, or a template component to create interaction on the dashboard.

You should be aware that you can replace the use of the select and multi-select components and make use of the filter component instead. Button and multi-button components can be used to filter data, but can also be used to create interaction on the dashboard, and you can use the multi-button component to replace selections using radio buttons and checkboxes. This is the reason why we didn't cover the radio-button and checkbox components. The multi-button component is much easier to style, and with the knowledge you have gained about the use of other selectors/filters, you should...