Book Image

Learning Pentaho CTools

By : Miguel Gaspar
Book Image

Learning Pentaho CTools

By: Miguel Gaspar

Overview of this book

Pentaho and CTools are two of the fastest and most rapidly growing tools for practical solutions not found in any other tool available on the market. Using Pentaho allows you to build a complete analytics solution, and CTools brings an advanced flexibility to customizing them in a remarkable way. CTools provides its users with the ability to utilize Web technologies and data visualization concepts, and make the most of best practices to create a huge visual impact. The book starts with the basics of the framework and how to get data to your dashboards. We'll take you all the way through to create your custom and advanced dashboards that will create an effective visual impact and provide the best user experience. You will be given deep insights into the lifecycle of dashboards and the working of various components. Further, you will create a custom dashboard using the Community Dashboards Editor and use datasources to load data on the components. You will also create custom content using Query, the Freeform Addins Popup, and text components. Next, you will make use of widgets to create similar sections and duplicate components to reproduce other components on a dashboard. You will then learn to build a plugin without writing Java code, use Sparkl as a CPK plugin manager, and understand the application of deployment and version control to dashboard development. Finally, you will learn tips and tricks that can be very useful while embedding dashboards into other applications. This guide is an invaluable tutorial if you are planning to use custom and advanced dashboards among the solutions that you are building with Pentaho.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Pentaho CTools
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Available types of CDA data sources


The data sources covered in this book are the ones already pointed out previously, but we need to see them in detail. To create a new data source, you should also specify the attribute type that will be used to distinguish the method to be called on the server side to get the data and return the results. Depending on the data source that you are creating, you should also specify some properties that may be different depending on the kind of data source. Let's look at each one of the available options.

Each one of the following distinguished subsections will give you a brief overview and inform you about the properties that should be defined for the connections and also for the Data Access types. There are some common properties, such as the columns, that we will cover later in this chapter. For now, we will only focus on the different ones.

SQL databases

You can use this type of connection to get data from any source that uses Structured Query Language (SQL...