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

Adding cross tabs


Cross tabs allow you to view dimensional data in a report. Using cross tabs, you can easily view two or more fields and how they relate based on a measure. For instance, you may want to see how much sales each sales person is doing during the course of a week, and a cross tab allows you to present that data easily, as shown in the following table:

 

Sales Person 1

Sales Person 2

Day 1

$1,240

$1,100

Day 2

$1,400

$1,000

Pentaho Reporting offers the ability to create cross tab-based reports. These are a special type of report that render differently than most standard reports. These reports also expect the data to be in a particular format. Traditionally, cross tab reports are driven by multidimensional queries. As highlighted in Chapter 5, Pentaho Reporting offers a Mondrian and olap4j DataFactory for providing multidimensional data to a report. Use the DenormalizedMDXDataFactory to populate a cross tab report. This Data Factory flattens out an MDX result set. The following...