Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers

December 1st, 2009 admin

So last week i was able to get a little time off from my latest BI contract in London and i’ve been able to get quite a few things done. In particular i’ve been able to read through the new Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers written by Will Gorman and published by Packt Publishing.

I have to admit, not being a fully fledged Java developer i would not usually go for a book with the title “Pentaho reporting for Java Developers” but i was pleasantly surprised with this book. Even though this book is aimed towards developers it does actually dedicate a couple of chapters to report development. This is especially useful if you are new to Pentaho reporting or moving on to Pentaho 3.5 from previous versions (I myself have been using Pentaho reporting since 1.2 and the leap to the new 3.5 report designer / engine was a big one.)

This book not only covers embedding Pentaho reporting into your own Swing / Enterprise web applications but also goes through the steps by step instructions to connect to datasources, design the report layout, add report parameters, charts, sub reports and much more. Then embed them into your own applications!

It also comes with a very handy report element reference section if you need to know what all the attributes of report elements do.

I honestly believe that if are a newcomer to Pentaho reporting and you are looking to get started, either embedded Pentaho reports into your own custom application or as a reprot writer looking to get started with the basics of report design then this book is for you.

I only wished i had this sort of book when i was using Pentaho Reports 1.2!

So stop getting frustrated asking the same basic reporting questions over and over again in the forums. Go out and get a copy of this book instead!

Posted in News, Reporting, random | Comments Off

Official CDF Tutorials

July 21st, 2009 admin

Some exciting news on the Pentaho dashboard design front!

Webdetails has released its official CDF tutorials. This set of step-by-step tutorials are aimed towards both novice and advanced users of the CDF with lessons ranging from the basics of getting started up to dynamic and drillable dashboards using an array of CDF components.

Some of the area’s covered in the tutorials include:

• Basics (getting started)
• Charts
• Templates
• Mondrian (Roles)
• Maps
• Tables
• and more

Ive been working with the CDF since V1 and even I found lots of interesting tips and reference material here. If you are serious about dashboard design with Pentaho then this tutorial pack is a must have!

Whats even nicer is that tutorials have been created using the CDF. Just another example of what the CDF is really capable of.

Check out the webdetails website for more information or purchase a copy of the tutorials at the online store

Posted in Dashboards, News | No Comments »

Amazing what you find

December 12th, 2008 admin

After looking for some code in one of my many “backup” directories i came across a .rar called college_work. After extracting its contents i was plunged back six years to the days of my multimedia design classes. One of my projects i was very proud of at the time was a simple game based on one of my favourite book series. And here it is for the first time for you to enjoy! (if it still works…)

Cookie Hunt

Posted in random | 2 Comments »

Video Tutorial Sample

August 31st, 2008 admin

I decided to post a sample (test) of my first Pentaho Reporting Video Tutorials. At the moment this example has no sound and isn’t really a tutorial as such but more of a “Look what you can do with Pentaho Report Designer”.

Hopefully in the coming days i will figure out how to record sound with my tutorials and then i can really get down to business (its too hard to follow a tutorial when there is no one explaining what and why they are doing).

Anyhow, you can download a copy of this tutorial here: example2.ogg

As always, feedback is appreciated and if you have and tips about recording the desktop WITH sound on Kubuntu then im all ears!!

It might also be worth noting that this video is in .ogg format. If you are on windows i would recommend downloading a copy of VLC. This will allow you to play the video.

Harris

Posted in Reporting | 1 Comment »

New Hosting

August 19th, 2008 admin

So you might have noticed the website has been down for the last couple of days? This was due to me changing my hosting provider and having a hard time getting it all moved across (silly .htaccess files…..).

Anyhow, In the next couple of days I intend to start creating video tutorials for PRD (Pentaho Report Designer) to help answer some of the basic questions we get alot of the time in ##pentaho. My question to you is, what do you want to know? Should we start from the basics and just work our way up or do you have suggestions for tutorials you want to see.

Let me know!

Harris

Posted in News | No Comments »

One Transformation on many database servers

July 19th, 2008 admin

A couple of days ago an individual on ##pentaho wanted to run a single kettle transformation against multiple databases on multiple database servers. After a little work we figured how to do it and this i would like to share with you.

What if you had a setup where you had many database servers running the same database at different locations with different user access credentials and you wanted to get all this data into the one place?

You could create a transformation that works for one database server using a static host, username and password and such then copy that transformation for as many database servers you have, changing the access credentials for each transformation. This would create a maintenance nightmare!

Instead, we are going to create a Kettle job that will loop our transformation and replace the host, username and password with a variable from an XML document for each database server.

To save time I have created a sample of these Kettle transformations / jobs that work with the Pentaho Sample data and attached them to this post for you to examine for yourself.

kettle_example.tar.gz

Please note that you will have to edit the db_connections.xml file to fit your database connection details for the Pentaho sampleData. Its also worth mentioning that the transformation get_database_data.ktr assumes that the sampleData is stored in a MySQL database. If this is not the case you will have to change this too.

Lets briefly go over whats happening in these Kettle jobs, sub jobs and transformations in the order they are executed.

The sample should contain six files. Two jobs, three transformations and an XML document.

db_connections.xml

This XML document contains all the connection credentials for each individual database server. For this example you can see that i have specified the same database server twice but in a real life example you would list ALL your database servers credentials here.

Main.kjb

This is the Main job that will execute all the sub jobs and transformations. It is our starting point. This job will run a transformation called get_db_connection_information.ktr and then run the sub job called sub_job.ktr

get_db_connection_information.ktr

This transformation will read our db_connections.xml document and pass the resulting data back to the stream.

sub_job.kjb

Now this sub job will loop for every set of connection details we get from the XML document thus running the set_enviroment_variables.ktr and get_database_data.ktr multiple times.

set_enviroemt_variables.ktr

This will take the first et of database credentials from the XML document and set them as variables.

get_database_data.ktr

And finally this transformation will use a table input step and the recently set variables for the connection information. This transformation will run and get one row of data rom the first database and output this into a text document.

So to sum up the whole job will take the two database connections from the xml document and loop the sub job twice thus outputting a text document with two rows of data (one rom for each time the get_database_data.ktr is run).

Hopefully this has made sense and someone will benefit from it.

Harris

Posted in ETL | No Comments »

Chart Type Selector for the CDF

July 16th, 2008 admin

Here’s a little CDF tip for your chart components.

There are times you cannot decide what sort of chart type you should use to display your data (Unless of course you have read any of the books from Steven Few. In that case you should know) so why not give the end user the ability to choose the chart type THEY want?

Well now you can!

Using the CDF and a couple of xactions we can generate a selector (either radio buttons or a pull down) that allows the user to change the chart type. To accomplish this we have to define an xaction that contains each one of the chart definitions and then pass the selected argument to the xaction and use it with a IF statement. If this doesn’t make much sense they do not fear. You can download a sample I created earlier today and see for yourself.

chart_selector.tar.gz

Any questions? Bugs? Let me know!

Harris

Posted in Dashboards | 2 Comments »

Another CDF Dashboard Recreation

July 16th, 2008 admin

Presenting for all you happy-go-lucky Penatho folks out there, the recreation of the penatho_sample dashboard for the CDF v2.0 (Community Dashboard Framework).

Download your copy - pentaho_sample.tar.gz

Any questions or bugs then feel free to let me know.

Harris

Posted in Dashboards | No Comments »

Pentaho Home Dashboard in CDF

July 10th, 2008 admin

If you are up to date with the Pentaho community and Pentaho Dashboard Development then you may have heard of the “Community Dashboard Frameword” (CDF) created by Ingo Klose and Pedro Alves.

This Dashboard Framework simplifies the dashboard creation process. Instead of having to create you own .jsp for dashboards you can now define them with simple JavaScript and HTML (and the xaction components of course).

Since the release of the CDF I have been creating all sorts of very functional dashboards and even recreated some on the Pentaho samples to share with you.

The first Dashboard I have recreated for the CDF is the one you would usually see right after you log into the platform. This dashboard is usually defined in Home.jsp as found in your webapps/pentaho/jsp folder.

Download the home_dashboard.tar.gz and extract it into your pentaho-solutions/dashboards/ directory.

If everything works okay then you should be able to open a new dashboard in the CDF called home_dashboard. This dashboard is an exact copy in functionality to the home.jsp dashboard. The only differences are…

• It was built for the CDF
• Unlike the home.jsp dashboard it does not require chart definition widgets (the entire chart component is defined the the xaction)

It might also be wirth mentioning that there is a custom Javascript function included in the template.html to overcome a functionality issue but you can find out about this in the comments.

Any questions? Dashboard requests? Comment here or join me (and others) on the ##pentaho IRC channel on irc.freenode.net

Thanks to Pedro for his support in creating this dashboard.

More to come!

Harris

Posted in Dashboards | No Comments »

Website Update

May 31st, 2008 admin

Ive decided to move away from Drupal in favour of Wordpress. Drupal has some great features for sure and I will continue to use it for my other websites but as far as blogging goes… Wordpress looks like the better option.

Posted in News | 1 Comment »