Chapter 1. What is Pentaho Report Designer?

In this chapter, we will explain what Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) is, and we will discuss its engine and its Graphical User Interface (GUI). We will also discuss the advantages that its open source license entails.

We will describe the two most common uses of PRD, which are embedding in Java projects and publishing to the Pentaho BA Server.

We will present the principal types of reports: Transactional Reporting, Tactical Reporting, Strategic Reporting, and Helper Reporting. As we will see throughout this book, PRD supports all of these types of reports.

Later, we will list the main features of PRD; this includes inserting charts (sparklines and JFreeCharts), a variety of export formats, parameterization, style expressions, crosstab reports, interactive reports, Java API, integration with the Pentaho suite, and abstraction layers.

We will make a brief review of the landmarks in the evolution of PRD and its different versions.

At the end of the chapter, we will display a series of PRD reports in order to show the scope of the potential capacities that PRD possesses.

Pentaho Reporting is a technology that allows you to design and build reports for the Pentaho BA platform and other application servers. Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) is a graphics tool that implements the report-editing function. The project from which PRD originated was originally called JFreeReport.

PRD is an open source tool licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL). This license provides the four basic freedoms of free software and the GNU GPL. And the L (Lesser) in LGPL indicates that this software can be used as part of or in combination with proprietary software, which provides greater flexibility for different licenses and software to coexist.

PRD contains a Java-based report engine that provides scalability, portability, and integration. Additionally, the editor's UI is implemented with Swing widgets, which give it a friendly, multiplatform look and feel. This UI is very intuitive, and it allows you to become familiar with the tools quickly.

PRD lets you create simple reports, wizard-based reports, advanced reports, reports with charts, subreports, parameterized reports, and others. Once a report has been created, PRD lets you export it in a variety of formats, such as PDF, Excel, HTML, and CSV, or preview it using Swing.

Since the beginning, PRD has benefitted from multiple contributions from the community, and currently the community supporting this project is growing and becoming more stable and contributing regularly in the form of code, wikis, documentation, forums, bug reports, tutorials, and so on.

PRD has two typical uses as follows: