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

Supported charts


Pentaho Reporting relies on JFreeChart, an open source Java chart library, for charting visualization within reports. From within Report Designer, many chart types are supported. In the chart editor, two areas of properties appear when editing a chart. The first area of properties is related to chart rendering, and the second tabbed area of properties is related to the data that populates a chart.

Following is the screenshot of the chart editor within Pentaho Report Designer:

All chart types receive their data from three general types of datasets. The first type is known as a Category Dataset , where the dataset series and values are grouped by categories. A series is like a sub-group. If the exact category and series appear, the chart will sum the values into a single result. The following table is a simple example of a category dataset:

Category

Series

Sale Price

Store 1 Sales

Cash

$14

Store 1 Sales

Credit

$12

Store 2 Sales

Cash

$100

Store 2 Sales

Credit

$120...