Chapter 15. Using Reports in Pentaho Business Analytics Platform

This chapter is the first one of a short series talking about using Pentaho reports in other components of the Pentaho Suite. In this chapter, in particular, you will learn how to use an existing Pentaho report in the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform. The Pentaho Business Analytics Platform is a web application used as frontend for final users and developers, enabling all of them to use its analytical tools such as dashboards, pivoting sessions, and obviously, reports.

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the basics of the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform, as well as a description of how to install it and upload Pentaho reports. Afterwards, you will learn how to manage permits and preview the report with a direct call or included in a Pentaho dashboard using the Pentaho CTools.

This chapter is written as a tutorial for developers and information technologists. The best way to learn is to follow the instructions on...

Introducing Pentaho Business Analytics Platform

As part of Pentaho's suite of products, Pentaho offers an open source Business Analytics Platform. The Business Analytics Platform is a web application that allows users to publish and manage reports within an enterprise business intelligence system. The Business Analytics Platform offers many capabilities, including the management and execution of Pentaho reports. By combining Pentaho Reporting and Pentaho's Business Analytics Platform, information technologists may utilize Pentaho Reporting in their environment without writing any code. In addition to the publishing and execution of reports, the open source Business Analytics Platform allows for scheduling, background execution, security, and much more.

With Pentaho's Enterprise Business Analytics Platform, additional capabilities are available, but in this book, we prefer to use the Community Edition as it is downloadable and available for everyone without any cost.

Installing the Business...

Publishing a report in the Business Analytics Platform

The first task to do to use a Pentaho report in the Business Analytics Platform is uploading it into the Pentaho repository. This is a preliminary task before every action, like previewing, scheduling, and so on. Once uploaded, the Pentaho report is automatically published and can be used to accordance with the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform permits and roles.

A Pentaho report can be uploaded in a Pentaho repository following three main paths: the manual upload, the publication using the Pentaho Report Designer, and the bulk import. In the following sections, you will discover the first two paths, because the bulk import is a suggested way if you have to manage a total or partial restore of the Pentaho repository.

Manually uploading a report

You can directly manually upload a Pentaho report by using the Browse Files page of the Pentaho user console. The first thing to do to upload a Pentaho report is to select a folder in the left...

Previewing a report

Now that the Pentaho report is correctly published in the Business Analytics Platform, what you probably expect to do is to start using it. The most simple use we can think of is the preview. The preview of a Pentaho report can be done in two different ways: by manually using the browse files page or through a direct link.

Previewing a report from the browse files page

Previewing a report from the browse files page is as straightforward as clicking on the .prpt file and selecting the Open item or the Open in a new window item. The difference between the two is easy to understand, but the final result is exactly the same, even if the target window will be different.

Previewing a report using a direct link

One of the most powerful features of the Business Analytics Platform is accessing a published report using a public URL. The public URL is defined as follow:

• The base URL. In our example, http://localhost:8080/pentaho.
• The endpoint path. In our example, /api/repos/.
• The path...

Managing permits and schedule

Using a Pentaho report through the Business Analytics Platform mean also having full control over who can do what. Pentaho Business Analytics Platform has a fine tuning system for permissions and everything is manageable through the browse files page. Starting from there, you can point to a report and you will see the Share item on the right panel. Clicking on it, a modal window will be presented, where you can control all the permits. Before moving forward, let's focus on the Inherits folder permissions check. This feature in particular enables you to inherit the permits in the repository structure quite easily. If you want to interrupt and customize the inheritance, uncheck this flag and add/remove the roles and single permission according to your needs. In the following screenshot, you can see how this window looks and look at all the possible settings:

In the same menu (on the right panel of the browse files page), you can see the Schedule item. Clicking...

Creating a dashboard with Pentaho reports

In Chapter 14, Building Interactive Reports, we discussed limiting the advanced interaction between reports to avoid failing projects. When interactions between visual elements become complex, the dashboards are probably the suggested solution. In the Pentaho suite, the right place to develop dashboards is the Business Analytics Platform, with the support of the CTools. CTools is a set of tools and components created to help you build custom dashboards on top of Pentaho. There are specific CTools for different purposes, but we will only introduce them as an example, considering they need an entire book to describe all the possibilities and nice features. Our goal in this section is to show an example of a dashboard, using the Pentaho reports as elements.

Community dashboard editor basics

A core part of the CTools, the Community Dashboard Editor (CDE), is included in the Pentaho user console as a graphical tool for creating, editing, and previewing...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use an existing Pentaho report in the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform, the web application used as frontend for final users and developers. In this chapter, you were introduced to the basics of the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform, as well as provided with a description on how to install it and upload Pentaho reports. After, you learnt how to preview it, how to manage permits, how to schedule it and how to develop a Pentaho dashboard using the Pentaho CTools.

Now that you have read this chapter, you should feel comfortable with the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform and all the basic features for managing Pentaho reports. This is an advanced task for developers and information technologists, to manage the frontend for your final customers and managers.

In the next chapter, you will learn more about using a Pentaho report in ETL jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load), using the Pentaho Data Integration (also known as...