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

The select component


The select component is part of the input components group. Based on the results of a query or based on a values array, it can be set on the properties or on the pre-execution of the component, and the user will be able to select an option from a dropdown. A select component can look like the following image:

To have a select component properly working, the first step is to create a placeholder for the filter, using the layout perspective. The following step is used to set up the query, but it is not needed when you want to set the values on the values array. Another step, and an important one, is to create the dashboard parameter to store the value that is selected by default, and to set the name of the parameter on the corresponding property. The last step is to add the component to the dashboard and set all the properties needed.

By clicking on Select Component inside the Select group, the component will become available. Once available, you will need to set: the name...