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Pentaho Reporting

  1. Maven Warning

If you intend to use Maven to use Pentaho Reporting, be aware that Maven does not resolve correctly against Pentaho's repository. The Pentaho build process produces invalid snapshot builds.

To fix that, run the build with the ant-property set to:

reporting.build.file=${REPORTING_SOURCES}/build-res/report-shared-experimental.xml

A local publish will work fine as long as you use ivy to resolve the dependencies.

  1. Introduction

Pentaho Reporting is Java class library for generating reports. It provides flexible reporting and printing functionality using data from multiple sources and supports output to display devices, printers, PDF, Excel, XHTML, PlainText, XML and CSV files.

The Pentaho Report Designer provides a graphical editor for report definitions and can also be used as standalone desktop reporting tool.

The library is optimized for performance and a small memory footprint and can run completely in memory without generating temporary files or requiring extra compilation steps. Pentaho Reporting gives the user a great degree of flexibility while designing reports.

This software is free and opensource software available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2.1.

For an up to date list of changes in the releases of Pentaho Reporting, please visit the JIRA system at http://jira.pentaho.com/browse/PRD There you will find all releases along with the issues fixed for each release.

  1. Available Distributions

Pentaho Reporting is a modular system and depending on the feature set you use, you may need a different set of applications or libraries.

Web-Based Reporting

If you intend to make reports available over the internet, we recommend to use the Pentaho BI-Server/BI-Platform to host your reports. The Pentaho BI-Platform is a J2EE-Web-Application that provides all services to run and manage reports in a Web-2.0 environment.

Standalone Reporting

The Pentaho Report-Designer can be used as a desktop reporting environment. The designer allows you to create and run reports manually and to create all supported document types (PDF, HTML, Text, RTF, Excel and CSV-files).

Embedded Reporting

The Pentaho Reporting Engine consists of a set of base libraries, the reporting engine core and several extension modules, which provide additional datasources as well as charting and barcode capabilities.

The Pentaho Reporting Engine ships with a Swing Print Preview dialog, which can be easily embedded into an existing Java/Swing application. The dialog offers access to all supported export file formats.

We created a SDK with four simple code examples and documents that walk you through the code to get you started more easily.

  1. System Requirements

Pentaho Reporting requires a minimum of 192MB of allocated heap-space to process reports. Reports with more than 400 pages or about 50.000 rows of data may require additional memory and/or adjustments to the global configuration parameters of the reporting engine.

The Pentaho Reporting Engine requires Java 1.5 or higher. The Pentaho Report Designer and Pentaho Report Design Wizard need at least Java 1.6 or higher.

Warning:

Pentaho Reporting requires a Java Runtime environment that is fully compatible to the Java Platform Specification 5.0 (JSR-176). It will not run with the GNU GCJ suite of tools.

  1. Installation

A. Windows

Download the ZIP distribution.

The Pentaho Report Designer can be extracted into any directory. We recommend that you place the report-designer into "C:\Program Files\report-designer" (or an equivalent) directory.

Start the application by executing (or double-clicking) either the "report-designer.bat" file or the launcher.jar file.

B. Linux/Solaris/Unix

Download either the ZIP or the TAR.GZ distribution.

The Pentaho Report Designer can be extracted into any directory. We recommend that you place the report-designer into "/opt/report-designer" (or an equivalent) directory.

Start the application by executing either

 cd /opt/report-designer
 ./report-designer.sh

or

 java -jar /opt/report-designer/launcher.jar

C. MacOS

Download the Mac-OS specific ZIP file and extract it by double clicking on it in the Finder. Move the extracted "Pentaho Report Designer" application into your Applications folder.

  1. Documentation

The Javadoc HTML pages for the latest release of Pentaho Reporting are available at

http://javadoc.pentaho.com/reporting/

You can also regenerate the Javadocs directly from the source code. There is a task "javadoc" in the Ant script (see below) that makes this relatively simple.

The reporting engine and thus most of the features of the report designer are well documented in Will Gorman's excellent book "Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers".

https://www.packtpub.com/pentaho-reporting-3-5-for-java-developers/book

Technical articles and general documentation can be found in our Wiki.

http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/Reporting/

If you intend to embed Pentaho Reporting in your own applications, the SDK contains a thorough step-by-step guide to the enclosed examples.

  1. Compilation

Code organization

Our code is split into three groups of modules.

  • “/libraries” contains all shared libraries and code that provides infrastructure that is not necessarily reporting related.
  • “/engine” contains the runtime code for Pentaho Reporting. If you want to embed our reporting engine into your own Swing application or whether you want to deploy it as part of a J2EE application, this contains all your ever need.
  • “/designer” contains our design-time tools, like the report-designer and the report-design-wizard. It also contains all data source UIs that are used in both the Report Designer and Pentaho Report Wizard.

If you use IntelliJ Idea for your Java work, then you will be delighted to find that the sources act as a fully configured IntelliJ project. Just open the ‘pentaho-reporting’ directory as project in IntelliJ and off you go. If you use Eclipse, well, why not give IntelliJ a try? Branching system

At Pentaho we use Scrum as our development process. We end up working on a set of features for about 3 weeks, called a Sprint. All work for that Sprint goes into a feature branch (sprint_XXX-4.0.0GA) and gets merged with the master at the end of the sprint.

If you want to keep an eye on our work while we are sprinting, check out the sprint branches. If you prefer is more stable, and are happy with updates every three weeks, stick to the master-branch.

During a Sprint, our CI system will build and publish artifacts from the sprint branches. If you don’t want that, then it is now easy to get your own build up and running in under 5 minutes (typing time, not waiting time). Building the project

The project root contains a global multibuild.xml file that can build all modules in one go. If you want it more finely granulated, each top level group (‘libraries’, ‘engine’, ‘designer’) contains its own ‘build.xml’ file to provide the same service for these modules.

To successfully build Pentaho Reporting, you do need Apache Ant 1.8.2 or newer. Go download it from the Apache Ant Website if you haven’t done it yet.

After you cloned our Git repository, you have all the source files on your computer. But before you can use the project, you will have to download the third party libraries used in the code.

On a command line in the project directory, call

ant resolve

to download all libraries.

If you’re going to use IntelliJ for your work, you are all set now and can

start our IntelliJ project.

To build all projects locally, invoke

ant continuous-local-testless

to run.

If you feel paranoid and want to run the tests while building, then use the ‘continuous-local’ target. This can take quite some time, as it also runs all tests. Expect to wait an hour while all tests run.

ant continuous-local

After the process is finished, you will find “Report Designer” zip and tar.gz packages in the folder “/designer/report-designer/assembly/dist”.

If you get OutOfMemoryErrors pointing to a JUnitTask, or if you get OutOfMemory “PermGen Space” errors, increase the memory of your Ant process to 1024m by setting the ANT_OPTS environment variable:

export ANT\_OPTS="-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

Building the project on a CI server

Last but not least: Do you want to run Pentaho Reporting in your own continuous integration server and you want to publish all created artifacts to your own maven-server? Then make sure you set up Maven to allow you to publish files to a repository.

  1. Install Artifactory or any other maven repository server.
  2. Copy one of the ‘ivy-settings.xml’ configurations from any of the modules and edit it to point to your own Maven server. Put this file into a location outside of the project, for instance into “$HOME/prd-ivy-settings.xml”
  3. Download and install maven as usual, then configure it to talk to the Artifactory server.

Edit your $HOME/.m2/settings.xml file and locate the ‘servers’ tag. Then configure it with the username and password of a user that can publish to your Artifactory server. Replace ‘your-server-id’ with a name describing your server. You will need that later. Replace ‘publish-username’ and ‘publish-password’ with the username and password of an account of your artifactory installation that has permission to deploy artifacts.

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"           
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"           
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0 
                    http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
   ...
   <servers>
     <server>
       <id>your-server-id</id>
       <username>publish-username</username>
       <password>publish-password</password>
       <configuration>
         <wagonprovider>httpclient</wagonprovider>
         <httpconfiguration>
           <put>
             <params>
               <param>
                 <name>http.authentication.preemptive</name>
                 <value>%b,true</value>
               </param>
             </params>
           </put>
         </httpconfiguration>
       </configuration>
     </server>
   </servers>
    ..
</settings>

Now set up your CI job. You can either override the ivy properties on each CI job, or your can create a global default by creating a ‘$HOME/.pentaho-reporting-build-settings.properties’ file. The settings of this file will be included in all Ant-builds for Pentaho Reporting projects.

ivy.settingsurl=file:${user.home}/prd-ivy-settings.xml
ivy.repository.id=your-server-id
ivy.repository.publish=http://repo.your-server.com/ext-snapshot-local

After that, test your setup by invoking

ant -f multibuild.xml continuous

It should run without errors now. If you see errors on publish, check your Maven configuration or your Artifactory installation.

  1. Reporting Bugs

Free support is available via the Pentaho Reporting forum.

http://forums.pentaho.org/forumdisplay.php?f=57

Please note that questions are answered by volunteers, so there is no guaranteed response time or level of service.

Please avoid e-mailing the developers directly for support questions. If you post a message in the forum, then everyone can see the question, and everyone can see the answer.

If you found a bug, please either discuss it in the forum or report it in our JIRA system. You will need to create a JIRA login before reporting the bug. Access to our JIRA system is free for everyone.

http://jira.pentaho.com/

  1. Commercial Support

Pentaho offers commercial support for Pentaho Reporting with guaranteed response times. Please see

http://www.pentaho.com/products/reporting/

for more details.