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The latest distribution for Report Designer is available on SourceFourge at SourceForge at []http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=140317. Download the Report Designer as part of the Pentaho Open BI Suite (pentaho_demo_hsqldb-1.6.0.GA.863.zip), if you plan to publish your reports using the BI Platform provided by Pentaho. To download the Report Designer as a standalone application, go to http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=140317&package_id=192362. To follow the instructions and tutorials included in the Report Designer documentation, you must install the Hypersonic distribution of the Sample Data (pentaho_sample_data-1.6.0.GA.863.zip).
After you download the contents follow the instructions below to install Report Designer:
- Extract contents of the zip file into a folder.
- Read the Readme for important updates.
- In the Report Designer folder, click the startdesigner.* file that is most appropriate for your operating system.
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Report Designer Start Up
The Report Designer displays a Welcome page and a default workspace at start up. The Welcome page provides you with a brief introduction of the Report Designer and some instructions for getting started. Click Design to open the report workspace.
In the center of the workspace a large white area represents the main working area where you build a report. On the left side of the Report Designer workspace is a panel called the Palette that lists the graphical elements of the report. On the right side of the workspace, the Structure panel allows you to see a hierarchical representation of the report. The Properties panel allows you to adjust the settings of the currently available selection. In the lower portion of the workspace, the Messages panel displays useful information, hints, warnings, and errors that apply to your current report definition.
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The same bands are marked with the same color in the Report Designer. Note that the bands have a label on the left side describing what this band is used for.
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If you adjusted a band to be very small, it may be possible that you cannot read the descriptive label anymore. In this case, hover over the label and a tool tip displays the text.
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There can also be multiple group header and group footer bands.
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To start, we are going to add a static title label to our report which that should be printed once on the first page of the report. To accomplish that, we We are going to add this label to the report header band. This label does not depend on the data delivered by our sample data source; therefore, hence it 's is also called a static label.
Select Click and drag the "Label" report element from the Palette toolwindow by pressing the mousebutton, dragging the label tool window to the report header band and releasing the mouse button.
The label is automatically selected after it was added to the report header band. You can move the label around using the mouse or resize the label by dragging one of the handles.
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You can use the Properties toolwindow tool window to adjust the text and font in use. Change the text to "Sales Report" and the font to "Dialog 24 Bold".
If you did not considerably change the size of the label, there will probably appear a warning may appear in the Messages toolwindow tool window telling you that the label is not big enough to show the text. Use the mouse and resize the label until there's enough space for the label to print the contents. Note that the warning message is immediatly immediately removed as soon as the label has a good size.
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Now we are going to add textfields that will finally contain data from our sample data source. Report elements which are dynamically filled with data will have the suffix field.
Drag&drop four Text Fields from the palette to the item band. The report definition should look like the following screenshot:
The Messages toolwindow tool window now shows several warnings about undefined fields. Each textfield should display a column from our sample data souce hence we need to set each textfields "Field Name" property in the Properties toolwindow tool window to match a column from the data source.
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Functions can be added through the Structure panel by selecting the "Reporting Functions" node. All available functions are listed in the Properties toolwindow tool window with a short description in a tooltip.
Since we want to calculate the sum of all price items in the report we select the "ItemSumFunction" and press the Add Function to Report button.
First we have to tell the function what field should be used to calculate the sum for and as a second property we must set the name of the function. This is very important, since the value of the sum will be accessible by this name. Note that an error is displayed in the messages toolwindow tool window until you set the name. It won't be possible to preview a report as long as an error is shown in this toolwindowtool window.
We set PRICE as the Field to use to calculate the sum and we use PRICE_SUM as the name of the function. Don't change the values of the Dependency Level and the Group.
We now just have to show this value somewhere on the report. For this purpose we will add a Text Field to the report footer band and set the Field Name property of the Text Field to PRICE_SUM (the functions name).
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When you expand the group in the Structure toolwindow tool window you can see that there is also a group header band and a group footer band available. These bands do not yet appear in the graphical report definition area. To make them appear just select both bands in the Structure toolwindow tool window and turn the Show In Layout GUI property on:
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To effectively make the group take visually effect, we move the FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME Text Fields to the group header. To do this you can either delete the existing fields and create new ones in the group header or you can cut/paste them. You can achieve this by selecting both fields, either in the graphical view or in the Structure toolwindowtool window, by holding the CTRL button on your keyboard and selecting the fields with the mouse.
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Adding the total sum for each group is almost identical as before:
Select the Report Functions node in the Structure toolwindowtool window
Choose the ItemSumFunction and add it to the report
Enter PRICE as the Field, CUSTOMER_GROUP as the group and CUSTOMER_PRICE_SUM as the function name
Add a Text Field to the group footer band, and set the Field Name to CUSTOMER_PRICE_SUM.
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That's all! You now have a report that sums the total sales and calculates the total sum for each customer. You can now start to visually enhance the report definition as you like.
After some adjustments, additional labels and a few lines here and there there resulting report looks as follows:
Tip
If you want to achieve almost the same thing with just a few clicks the chapter about the wizard is for you.