Chapter 3. Getting Started with Reporting SDK

After the introduction of Pentaho Reporting and the development of a first report using the Report Design Wizard, in this chapter, you are going to leave the world of what-you-see-is-what-you-get report building and enter the Java land of Pentaho Reporting SDK. At the end of this initial discovery, you will learn how to create a web application in Java using Pentaho Reporting, with the goal to preview the Pentaho report you developed in previous chapter.

You will begin by downloading and setting up the Pentaho Reporting SDK. From there, you will understand more about the anatomy of the SDK package, through some initial details of the directory structure and the various libraries and samples included with it. To make the discovery more practical, you will see how to include the samples in an Eclipse project.

After the introduction of the Pentaho Reporting SDK, the hands-on session will be dedicated to a different topic: creating a web application...

Obtaining the Pentaho Reporting SDK

In Chapter 2, Getting Started with Report Designer, you saw where to find all the Pentaho Reporting tools: at the SourceForge website (https://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho), particularly in the Report Designer folder of the Files repository. In the Report Designer folder, you find a ZIP file called pre-classic-sdk-*.zip, containing the whole Pentaho Reporting SDK. As you can imagine, download the ZIP file into your laptop and that's all. As introduced for Report Designer, the distribution packages are always free for downloading and no fee or costs should be required.

Once you have downloaded the distribution package of Pentaho Reporting SDK, create a directory on your machine and unzip the contents inside. This is all you have to do to get Pentaho Reporting SDK available in your environment. Before moving forward, note the PDF file called embedding_pentaho_reporting_engine in the documentation folder. This file is extremely useful and we highly recommend...

Creating a web application using Pentaho Reporting and Maven

In this section, you'll learn how to create a web application from scratch, using the Pentaho Reporting Engine. This example is useful if you also want to understand how to embed the Pentaho Reporting Engine into an existing web application. In this example, in particular, you will see how to create a Java web application showing the Pentaho report you developed in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Report Designer. As you probably remember, we saw how to create a Pentaho report using the Report Design Wizard and we named it my_first_report. 

Differently from the examples introduced in the Pentaho Reporting SDK, in this book we are going to use Apache Maven, the most used software project management and comprehension tool for Java.

To better describe the tasks and give you the opportunity to test the correct results, we are going to split the project into a few subtasks: one paragraph for each task, with source code and screenshots...

Summary

In this chapter, you have walked through a complete example with step-by-step instructions on how to embed Pentaho Reporting in a Java J2EE Application. In the first part of the chapter, you downloaded, installed, and studied the official Pentaho Reporting SDK, discovering its structure, the samples, and the provided guide.

In the second part of the chapter, you developed a brand new web application in Java, using Apache Maven and including the Pentaho Report Engine in the project. To make the example more practical, you saw how to manage the Pentaho report developed in the previous chapter from the Java code. The goal has been to preview the Pentaho report in PDF format, using your browser.

Now that you have read this chapter, you should be confident with the basics about Pentaho Reporting SDK and how to build a Java application consuming Pentaho reports. In the next chapter, you will start a deep learning of Pentaho Report Designer, understanding the funding principles and developing...