Book Image

Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers

Book Image

Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers

Overview of this book

Pentaho Reporting lets you create, generate, and distribute rich and sophisticated report content from different data sources. Knowing how to use it quickly and efficiently gives you the edge in producing reports from your database. If you have been looking for a book that has plenty of easy-to-understand instructions and also contains lots of examples and screenshots, this is where your search ends. This book shows you how to replace or build your enterprise reporting solution from scratch with Pentaho's Reporting Suite. Through detailed examples, it dives deeply into all aspects of Pentaho's reporting functionalities, providing you with the knowledge you need to master report creation. This book starts off with a number of examples to get you familiar with the tools and technology of the Pentaho Reporting Suite. Then, with additional examples, it goes into advanced subjects such as charting, sub-reporting, cross tabs, as well as API generation of reports. There are also details and examples on extending Pentaho's open source reporting engine. The reader will learn the ins and outs of Pentaho Report Designer, including a cheat sheet with all the available short-cut keys, to make report design efficient and painless. Embedding reports into your Java application can be difficult. With Pentaho Reporting it's just a few lines of code. The book provides examples of how to embed reporting into your J2EE and client Java applications, as well as showing you how to build dynamic reports from scratch using Pentaho Reporting's simple Java Bean-based report generation API. Setting up and integrating a reporting server in an enterprise environment can be arduous. In addition to learning how to build great embeddable reports, you'll also learn how to combine Pentaho Reporting with Pentaho's BI Server for a zero-code, easy-to-configure, enterprise reporting solution.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Setting up the example data source


In most cases, you'll be using Pentaho Reporting with an already existing dataset—be it CSV, a relational database, or another form of data. To demonstrate the capabilities of Pentaho Reporting, a reasonably believable data source is included with this book, which will allow you to learn Pentaho Reporting's capabilities.

Included is a dataset for a fictional retail company called ElectroBarn that sells computer and electronics supplies. This dataset includes inventory, purchases, invoices, and customer relational tables, which are used for the three reporting examples in this chapter.

The examples that will follow use HSQLDB's file-based embedded database option to access the JDBC database without the need to start a separate server. HSQLDB is a lightweight Java database. To learn more about HSQLDB, visit http://www.hsqldb.org. As long as the hsqldb.jar library is included in your classpath, you will be able to execute SQL queries. In the examples that will...