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

Summary


In this chapter, we created a copy of the previously created report and modified it to use a relational source to obtain its data. We then learned about JDBC and JDBC drivers, downloaded the MySQL JDBC driver, and copied it into Pentaho BI Server and PRD.

We also created a JDBC connection with our sakila database and wrote an SQL query to obtain data to fill our report. We learned how to modify certain sections and objects of our report; among these modifications, we configured Details Header and Details Footer sections to be repeated on every page.

We discussed the most commonly used aggregation functions and created a formula to use a function to modify the style of an object. We also explained how to use and apply an encoding charset to our report.

Finally, in order to strengthen the acquired knowledge we proposed the creation of a new report from the ground up.

In the next chapter we will explain how to create Groups in our reports.