Pentaho 8 Reporting for Java Developers

Francesco Corti

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781788295833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Business

Create reports and solve common report problems with minimal fuss.About This Book• Use this unique book to master the basics and advanced features of Pentaho 8 Reporting.• A book showing developers and analysts with IT skills how to create and use the best possible reports using the Pentaho platform.• Written with a very practical approach: full of tutorials and practical examples (source code included).Who This Book Is ForThis book is written for two types of professionals and students: Information Technologists with a basic knowledge of Databases and Java Developers with medium seniority. Developers will be interested to discover how to embed reports in a third-party Java application.What You Will Learn• The basics of Pentaho Reporting (Designer and SDK) and its initial setup.• Develop the most attractive reports on top of a wide range of data sources.• Perform detailed customization of layout, parameterization, internationalization, behaviors, and more for your custom reports developed with Pentaho Reporting.• Integrate Pentaho reports into third-party Java application with full control over interactions, layout, and behavior in general.• Use Pentaho reports in the other components of the Pentaho Suite (BA Platform and PDI).In DetailThis hands-on tutorial, filled with exercises and examples, introduces the reader to a variety of concepts within Pentaho Reporting. With screenshots that show you how reports look at design time as well as how they should look when rendered as PDF, Excel, HTML, Text, Rich-Text-File, XML, and CSV, this book also contains complete example source code that you can copy and paste into your environment to get up-and-running quickly. Updated to cover the features of Pentaho 8, this book will teach you everything you need to know to build fast, efficient reports using Pentaho. If your interest lies in the technical details of creating reports and you want to see how to solve common reporting problems with a minimum of fuss, this is the book for you.Style and approachA step-by-step guide covering technical topics relating to environments, best practices, and source code, to enable the reader to assemble the best reports and use them in existing Java applications.

Including Graphics and Charts in Reports

After the discovery of all the possible data source types, in this chapter you will learn how to incorporate graphics and charts in your Pentaho reports. You will start understanding how to include graphics and charts from the Pentaho Report Designer and then you will move on to the description of all the settings and configurations. Graphics and charts will be described one by one, as we did for the data sources, with the goal to make you a real expert for the best final result; the most useful and appealing report for your customers and manager.

In particular, the charts discussed are bar charts, line charts, area charts, bar line charts, pie charts, multipie charts, ring charts, bubble charts, scatter plot charts, XY bar charts, XY line charts (regular and extended), XY area charts, XY area line charts, waterfall charts, radar charts, thermometer charts, bar-sparklines, line-sparklines, and pie-sparklines.

This chapter is written as a reference manual for developers and information technologists. The goal is to share all the relevant and advanced features about graphics and charts that are available in Pentaho Report Designer.

Including static images in reports

Including static images in your Pentaho report is useful, because in that way you can add logos, and graphics in general, to make the final result more appealing for the users.

To include static images in your report, select the image icon (

) from the Report Designer palette and place it into your report. Double-click on the element, or right-click on it by selecting Edit Content, to bring up a resource dialog where you can browse to the specific file location. You may select the Link to option to link an external resource, or you may select Embed to include the image in the .prpt file.

If you are in doubt, using the embedded image is always a good choice, as you can avoid the bad side effect of a change in the external link. When embedding the image, the dimensions of the .prpt file will be bigger.

Including dynamic images in reports

Including dynamic images in your Pentaho report is useful, because in that way you can add logos, and graphics in general, that may change according to a data source. As an example, we can imagine a report changing its logo depending on the department of the user or the image of a product in a product list.

To add dynamic images to your report, use the image-field icon (

) from the Report Designer palette and place it in your report. The content field accepts different types of image inputs for rendering. By double-clicking on the element, you can edit the source pointing to the right field of your dataset. If you have a field that contains a URL or file system location to your image, the image-field element will render the specified image.

Includi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Credits
• About the Author
• About the Reviewers
• www.PacktPub.com
• Customer Feedback
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction to Pentaho Reporting
• Getting Started with Report Designer
• Getting Started with Reporting SDK
• Creating a Report with Report Designer
• Design and Layout in Report Designer
• Configuring JDBC and Other Data Sources
• Including Graphics and Charts in Reports
• Parameterization, Functions, Variables, and Formulas
• Internationalization and Localization
• Subreports and Cross Tabs
• The PRPT Format and the Java API to Build It
• Developing Using Data Sources
• Internationalization, Subreports, and Cross Tabs Using Java
• Building Interactive Reports
• Using Reports in Pentaho Business Analytics Platform
• Using Reports in Pentaho Data Integration
• Pentaho Reporting Nightly Build and Support