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

Report bands


When first creating a report in your canvas and report explorer structure tree, you will see a Page Header, Report Header, Details band, Report Footer, and a Page Footer band appear as part of the report. These bands, along with other bands, including Group, Watermark, and No Data bands that you may define, make up the entire visual report. All bands may contain elements from the palette, and act as containers for rendering these elements. Each band has a different life cycle, and is rendered based on their context. In this section, you'll go over each band's properties, along with the context in which each band renders itself.

Common properties

All bands share a common set of properties, which are explained using tables in the forthcoming sub-sections. Certain properties may offer a dialog for editing, which is displayed in the list as well.

Size and position properties

These properties define the size and position for the band. These properties may be edited together by...