Will Gorman is an Engineering Team Lead at Pentaho. He works on a variety of Pentaho's products, including Reporting, Analysis, Dashboards, Metadata, and the BI Server. Will started his career at GE Research, and earned his Masters degree in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy New York. Over the years, Will has given many talks, including topics at local Java User Groups. He has published technical papers in journals such as Neurology, and is the author of multiple patents. Will is originally from Cincinnati and now lives in Orlando, Florida, the headquarters of Pentaho.

This example-rich practical guide walks you through every aspect of Pentaho Reporting, including report layout, data source support, enterprise deployment, along with advanced topics such as side-by-side sub-reporting, cross tabs, API report development, and more.

In Detail

Pentaho Reporting lets you create, generate, and distribute rich and sophisticated report content from different data sources. Knowing how to use it quickly and efficiently gives you the edge in producing reports from your database. If you have been looking for a book that has plenty of easy-to-understand instructions and also contains lots of examples and screenshots, this is where your search ends.

This book shows you how to replace or build your enterprise reporting solution from scratch with Pentaho's Reporting Suite. Through detailed examples, it dives deeply into all aspects of Pentaho's reporting functionalities, providing you with the knowledge you need to master report creation.

This book starts off with a number of examples to get you familiar with the tools and technology of the Pentaho Reporting Suite. Then, with additional examples, it goes into advanced subjects such as charting, sub-reporting, cross tabs, as well as API generation of reports. There are also details and examples on extending Pentaho's open source reporting engine. The reader will learn the ins and outs of Pentaho Report Designer, including a cheat sheet with all the available short-cut keys, to make report design efficient and painless.

Embedding reports into your Java application can be difficult. With Pentaho Reporting it's just a few lines of code. The book provides examples of how to embed reporting into your J2EE and client Java applications, as well as showing you how to build dynamic reports from scratch using Pentaho Reporting's simple Java Bean-based report generation API.

Setting up and integrating a reporting server in an enterprise environment can be arduous. In addition to learning how to build great embeddable reports, you'll also learn how to combine Pentaho Reporting with Pentaho's BI Server for a zero-code, easy-to-configure, enterprise reporting solution.

What you will learn from this book

Install and get started with Pentaho Reporting

Build great-looking reports that render as PDF, Excel, and HTML using Pentaho Report Designer

Learn the ins and outs of Pentaho Report Designer, including a list of short-cut keys for quick report generation

Configure your JDBC database and other data sources to drive dynamic reports

Include Pie, Bar, Line, and many other chart types within your reports, as well as other graphics

Parameterize your reports, using the open formula standard to drive calculations within your reports

Add sub-reports and cross tabs in your reports to more effectively present information

Build interactive Swing and HTML reports that are more like dashboards than traditional static enterprise reports

Build Pentaho Reports programmatically with easy-to-use XML and Java APIs

Learn to write your own open formula functions and custom graphical elements in reports

Write your own extensions to Pentaho Reporting, for complete integration and customization into your environment

Find out why you should use open source reporting over proprietary reporting offerings (hint: it's free and you can customize it)

Install Pentaho's BI Server and deploy your reports with permissions and scheduling with zero code.

Chapter 1 An introduction to Pentaho Reporting – Get a quick overview of Pentaho Reporting, including a feature summary and architectural summary, as well as a history of the product.

Chapter 2 Pentaho Reporting client and enterprise examples – Install and create reports, and learn to embed reports in your J2EE and client Java applications.

Chapter 3 Pentaho Reporting examples in the real world – Connect to a JDBC data source and create realistic inventory, balance, and invoice reports, including charts and sub-reports.

Chapter 4 Design and layout in Pentaho's Report Designer – Take a deep dive into Pentaho's Report Designer, learning how to create great-looking reports.

Chapter 5 Working with data sources – Learn the various ways to connect your report to live data, including JDBC, Hibernate, Java Beans, OLAP, and many other data sources.

Chapter 6 Including charts and graphics in reports – Incorporate Pie, Bar, Line and many other chart types in your reports, as well as including dynamic images in your report.

Chapter 7 Parameterization, functions, formulas and style expressions in reports – Define parameters for dynamic report generation. Write formulas and use available functions for rich summary and calculated values in your reports. Dynamically adjust colors and styles using expressions in your report.

Chapter 8 Adding sub-reports and cross tabs to reports – Build reports that include side-by-side sub-reports and cross tabs.

Chapter 9 Building interactive reports – These aren't standard boring static reports. Learn how to add dynamic interaction to HTML and Swing reports, for immediate feedback and dashboard-like functionality.

Chapter 10 API-based report generation – Build reports from XML and by using Pentaho Reporting's Java Bean API.

Chapter 11 Extending Pentaho Reporting – Learn to write custom functions and elements within Pentaho Reporting.

Chapter 12 Additional Pentaho Reporting topics – Discover how to use Pentaho Reporting with the Pentaho BI Server, including Pentaho Metadata. Learn more about Pentaho Reporting's open source approach, and how you can contribute to the free software movement.

Approach

This 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, or HTML, this book also contains complete example source code that you can copy and paste into your environment to get up and running quickly.

Who this book is written for

This book is primarily written for Java developers who want to assemble custom reporting solutions with Pentaho Reporting. Their main interest is in the technical details of creating reports and they want to see how to solve common report problems with a minimum of fuss; they do not need an overview of BI or the importance of reporting.

Secondary audiences of this book are information technologists who need to install a reporting solution in their environment, and want to learn advanced concepts within Pentaho Reporting such as sub-reports, cross-tabs, data source configuration, and metadata-based reporting.