Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers..

So ages ago I got sent Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers by Will Gorman or Pentaho Dev fame, and was asked to review it. As everyone who follows this blog and irc will know, my life has been in a bit of a state of flux so I've been short of time, but whilst reading it I did write some notes which I will now translate into a bit of a review.

So we start with a well structured history of Pentaho reporting, coupled with some nice screenshots the obligatory terrible photos and a good way to get the read acclimatised with Pentaho reporting, what it does and where it comes from.

Next we move on to a very good introduction to reporting, in this chapter we run through Pentaho Report Designer basics and Will also explains in great detail how to create a basic swing application and access your report from within that application. This is a very good chapter for those people, like myself, who know Pentaho Reporting is Java based but have no idea how you would integrate your report into your application.

In Chapter 3 Will runs through some real world reporting scenarios, the chapter is very similar to the previous one but we expand on what we have done by adding basic charts, learning about groups and other features in Pentaho Report Designer and finally integration into a J2EE application.

Chapter 4 dives head first into Pentaho Report Designer design and layouting techniques. This chapter goes into great detail explaining a lot of the various properties and key features you will end up using.

The next chapter runs you through the various data sources available to you in Pentaho Reporting, this is a very important chapter if you're not planning to use basic SQL to retrieve your data, it runs through the various interfaces gives samples for each connector and hopefully allows you to connnect to your data in a sensible way.

I've run through the charting chapter in a previous post so I'll skip that, if you're interested in reading about the charts then check here.

Chapter 7 runs through the various parameters, functions, formula available to you in Pentaho Reporting, and there are a lot of them, there's a list of all the current functions available and how they work followed by an explanation of the formula Pentaho Reporting uses and the syntax involved. Lastly in this chapter Will writes a brief explanation as to how you can internationalize your reporting allowing different locales to see the labels etc in a different language.

Next we move on to subreports and cross tabs. Sub reports have been available for years in Pentaho Reports but 3.5 brings along some welcome improvements, notably side by side subreports. Will gives and example of this and a very detailed standard subreport example. Crosstabs are very new to Pentaho Reports but Pentaho Report Designer does have some hidden support for them, Will shows you how to access this support and how to create a basic SQL and MDX cross tab report, this is a very useful technique but at the moment a little complex, so be warned!

Chapter 9 introduces interactivity to your reports, using action listeners. There is a Swing based example and also interactive HTML. Obviously this is of great use to most people as we aren't just supplying static reports.

Chapters 10 and 11 are where it gets really hairy. Chapter 10 gives a very good explanation as to how you would create reports solely using Pentaho Reporting API. This isn't for the faint of heart but it could prove very useful to study to help you understand how Pentaho Reporting works. There is a handwritten XML definition, detailed information about every file in a PRPT bundle and how to create a bundle. Will also gives detail instruction on how to build a report using the API code. The next chapter goes on to explain how to expand Pentaho Reporting using various custom expressions and formula and an example as to how you can use Bean Shell Expressions with in your report.

We finish this brief insight into the book with the last chapter, chapter 12. I can't help but feel this is slightly unnecessary apart from to keep the Pentaho gods happy, which in itself isn't a bad thing if more of these books keep appearing. Anyway its a brief run through of the BI Server and Reporting integration into the BI Server. But then it does also go onto explain how to run the report to different output formats to pipe stuff off to POJO's etc.

All in all a great book and a very detailed introduction to Pentaho Reporting that will certainly serve as a great reference manual on my bookshelf for when we come to sort out some reporting functionality in PAT.

Good stuff Will and my apologies to Richard Dias at Packt Publishing for not having this online earlier. If you want a copy click here.

Trout, out.

Upgrade to 3.5

So then, today I chose to upgrade the 3.0 BI Server at work to 3.5, great news, and it got off to a good start by 9am I had most of the stuff swapped over, authentication up and running and pretty much good to go. The rest of the day hasn't been so great, I thought this morning it would be a good idea to download Sugar CI, because I know people have been suggesting it due to reporting modifications made after 3.5 was released and things were complicated.

So I grabbed it downloaded, extracted, set it up, got it running, logged in, went to change some folder permissions... damn, the Properties window doesn't work, FF and IE throw a javascript error. Stuff it I thought, I'll play safe and use 3.5 GA, so I grabbed that and got it mostly running just before lunch, swapped over the config again, this time bothered to configure CAS hacking around my old ACEGI script, Spring Security btw is great, the script is so much cleaner.

Anyway got everything setup, then discovered the MDX parameters I needed to parse the date stuff only work in Sugar CI, balls. So I've grabbed a 3rd BI Server from CI downloaded and quickly tested it, also broken.
Since these modifications made post 3.5 GA were by a lot of people deemed very important, well important enough for people to go into production with a CI build, why has Pentaho not released a 3.5.1 or similar so we don't have to go around matching builds together and finding ones that work?


Enough moaning, I appreciate CI is exactly what it says on the tin. Anyway later tonight, I'll finally get around to posting a run down of Will Gormans book to keep Packt happy.

TTFN

Tom

Bowing out... for now

The last 2 days have made me realise how much I need a change in workplace, not necessarily career direction but the 12 hours in 2 days commuting has brought it all home.

So until I get a new job whatever that may be(, to be honest at the moment I'd take a first line support job if it meant I wasn't getting home at 9pm), I will not be on IRC, or moderating the forums as I feel its too much of a distraction from what I really need to be doing which is hitting up recruiters and potential employers. I've spent the last 2 years sorta helping people and now its time I helped my self!

So cheers guys, I'll be back soonish, PAT guys, you can mail me or hit up the dev list, I'll still be working on it in my spare time, as usual ;) , Pentaho guys if you need anything you know where to find me.

See ya in a few weeks(hopefully),

Trout, out.

Lucid looking to the future

Lucid was recently bought from the firesale at LucidEra by Nick Goodman. He's looking to take it forward and with the help of JVS bring new features and a commercial version. For those looking to help out taking LucidDB to the next level check out the mailing list, website and finally they've got around to sorting out an IRC channel ##luciddb on freenode.

Good stuff guys and I'm looking forward to the future.

TTFN
Tom

PAT and Paypal

Just a quick note to all you generous souls out there, we have attached a paypal button to the PAT googlecode page here: http://code.google.com/p/pentahoanalysistool/

If anyone is feeling generous enough to help us maintain our Maven server and the public testing server we use, or just buy us beer... then you know what you can do ;)

A big thank you to anyone who donates!

Cheers

Tom

Google Analytics Traffic

GA now reports our hits 35% above normal which is great stuff, and all this pretty much spawned from the Clear View buy out. I thought I'd show you the chart....

The area I colured in a faint yellow on the right is the are since clear view was announced to the world.... I'm quite impressed ;)

Cheers

Tom

Pentaho Analysis Tool 0.5.0-Snapshot

Due to the fact we had the PAT Community Webex last week, and a stack of twitter and blog space this week, we have zipped up the latest 0.5.0 Snapshot and uploaded it to googlecode.

This isn't supposed to be a stable release just a snapshot of where we are and a good indication of the direction we're headed. We have some basic drilling in there, although the lack of true drilling support is proving problematic. We also have some basic OFC charts(Select the chart panel first before running a query, else you don't see the buttons allowing you to change chart type.) We also have a new dimension browser and other stuff for you to play with and break.

Coming soon we will have a new query builder that will basically allow drag to table, and also we will have a brand spanking new theme to bring us right up to date. Hopefully I will also find some time to crack query model saving and loading so we can soon bring that to you as well. I think once those features and whatever else we can add when we're bored and want a challenge we will look to consolidate, bug fix and ship a fuller release that will bring us closer to 1.0 sometime still targeted for around Christmas.

FOR THOSE WHO TEST IT, IT RUNS ON PORT 9999 SO YOU CAN TEST IT CONNECTING TO THE BI SERVER XML/A. LOGIN IS: ADMIN and PASSWORD: ADMIN

Let us know what you think!