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 add-ins


We have seen that both the table and template component can make use of add-ins. We can also extend CDF and create new add-ins that can be added to the dashboard. You should always be aware that when using it on a table component the add-in will be used for the cell of the table, so be cautious about what you are showing for each cell, so that the table does not become hard to read due to excessive information. Just because dashboard users get information from a dashboard does not mean you should present excessive information.

To add a new add-in you just need to write a few lines of code and some properties, create a new instance of an add-in, and register it to the dashboard. The definition of the add-ins will be set using a JSON structure with the following elements:

  • name: This is the name/identifier given to the add-in, which will be used to reference it. This field is mandatory and accepts a string.

  • label: This will be the description of the add-in. It accepts a string...