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

Creating and using parameters in data sources


You can see a parameter as a variable which is storing some value. In the last example, we created a parameter, and now we want to make use of it so we can send it to the query and have queries that can give back different results, depending on the input. To achieve this, we need to have a parameter inside the query in a way that we can later pass some value through the parameter. You already saw how to create parameters in the queries and how to set default values. Now we want to send a value to the query that can change depending on the user interaction, so the user can get the intended results, and have a proper visualization with the correct information in it:

require(['cdf/Dashboard.Bootstrap', 'cdf/components/TableComponent'], 
   function(Dashboard, TableComponent) {
      dashboard = new Dashboard();
      dashboard.addParameter('marketDashParam','[Markets].[All Markets]');
      var path = dashboard.context.path;
      var dashPath =...