Book Image

Pentaho 8 Reporting for Java Developers

By : Jasmine Kaur, Francesco Corti
Book Image

Pentaho 8 Reporting for Java Developers

By: Jasmine Kaur, Francesco Corti

Overview of this book

This hands-on tutorial, filled with exercises and examples, introduces the reader to a variety of concepts within Pentaho Reporting. With screenshots that show you how reports look at design time as well as how they should look when rendered as PDF, Excel, HTML, Text, Rich-Text-File, XML, and CSV, this book also contains complete example source code that you can copy and paste into your environment to get up-and-running quickly. Updated to cover the features of Pentaho 8, this book will teach you everything you need to know to build fast, efficient reports using Pentaho. If your interest lies in the technical details of creating reports and you want to see how to solve common reporting problems with a minimum of fuss, this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Working with formulas


In addition to providing functions within reports, formulas may also be used to generate dynamic content in a report. Formulas may be used to derive element property and style values. Also, the Open Formula and Open Formula (Advanced) functions defined earlier may be used to combine the formula and function mechanisms in a report.

Formulas in Pentaho Reporting are based on the Open Formula standard. This standard is similar to Excel formula support, and is used in OpenOffice as well as other tools such as Pentaho Metadata. This formula system is often referred to as LibFormula, which is the library name for reporting's formula subproject.

Creating a formula

As you learnt in the section about functions and expressions, there are two places where Open Formula and Open Formula (Advanced) can be used: in the Data tab of report explorer and in each property expression in the element properties panel. Once Open Formula or Open Formula (Advanced) is requested, the formula editor...