In this chapter, we will explain what Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) is, and we will discuss its engine and its Graphical User Interface (GUI). We will also discuss the advantages that its open source license entails.
We will describe the two most common uses of PRD, which are embedding in Java projects and publishing to the Pentaho BA Server.
We will present the principal types of reports: Transactional Reporting, Tactical Reporting, Strategic Reporting, and Helper Reporting. As we will see throughout this book, PRD supports all of these types of reports.
Later, we will list the main features of PRD; this includes inserting charts (sparklines and JFreeCharts), a variety of export formats, parameterization, style expressions, crosstab reports, interactive reports, Java API, integration with the Pentaho suite, and abstraction layers.
We will make a brief review of the landmarks in the evolution of PRD and its different versions.
At the end of the chapter, we will display a series of PRD reports in order to show the scope of the potential capacities that PRD possesses.
Pentaho Reporting is a technology that allows you to design and build reports for the Pentaho BA platform and other application servers. Pentaho Report Designer (PRD) is a graphics tool that implements the report-editing function. The project from which PRD originated was originally called JFreeReport.
PRD is an open source tool licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL). This license provides the four basic freedoms of free software and the GNU GPL. And the L (Lesser) in LGPL indicates that this software can be used as part of or in combination with proprietary software, which provides greater flexibility for different licenses and software to coexist.
Note
For more information about free software and the GNU project, visit http://www.gnu.org/.
To read more about the GNU GPL and GNU LGPL licenses, visit http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.en.html.
PRD contains a Java-based report engine that provides scalability, portability, and integration. Additionally, the editor's UI is implemented with Swing widgets, which give it a friendly, multiplatform look and feel. This UI is very intuitive, and it allows you to become familiar with the tools quickly.
PRD lets you create simple reports, wizard-based reports, advanced reports, reports with charts, subreports, parameterized reports, and others. Once a report has been created, PRD lets you export it in a variety of formats, such as PDF, Excel, HTML, and CSV, or preview it using Swing.
Since the beginning, PRD has benefitted from multiple contributions from the community, and currently the community supporting this project is growing and becoming more stable and contributing regularly in the form of code, wikis, documentation, forums, bug reports, tutorials, and so on.
PRD has two typical uses as follows:
- It can be embedded in Java projects in desktop and web applications. In this book, we will develop a good example of how to embed PRD reports in web applications.
- It can, in a few steps, publish reports to the Pentaho BA Server to be used from there. It can, furthermore, be embedded in other application servers. These points will also be addressed in this book.
There are various categories that reports can be grouped into. From our perspective, the following categories are the most important:
- Transactional reports: Data for these reports comes from transactions and their objective is to present data at a very detailed and granular level. This type of report is usually used in an organization's day-to-day business. Examples of this kind of report are sales receipts, purchase orders, and so on.
- Tactical reports: Data for these reports comes from summaries of transactional data. The level of summary is low, usually not more than daily or weekly. This type of report contains information to support short-term decision making. For example, a stock inventory allows us to place orders to replace merchandise.
- Strategic reports: These reports commonly used data sources clean, reliable and stable, for example of a data warehouse, and their goal is to create business information. This kind of report supports medium and long-term decision making and is usually highly summarized; it allows for parameterization and includes charts and subreports. For example, a seasonal analysis of sales lets us determine what marketing campaigns should be carried out at given periods of time.
- Helper reports: Data for these reports comes from diverse origins and contains information that may not be normalized, including photos, images, and bar codes. This kind of report is not aimed at supporting decision making but serves a variety of interests. Examples of this kind of report are technical product descriptions, letterheads, ID cards, and so on.
Note
Defining data
Data is an expression that describes some characteristic of an entity. For example, in saying that a box is black, we are specifying data (black) regarding a characteristic (color) of an entity (box).
Defining information
Information is obtained through data processing. Data can be processed through summary, classification, grouping, and ordering.