Installing and configuring PRD
This page will guide you through the process of installing the Pentaho Report Designer Community Edition.
In addition it also covers any additional optional steps needed to install extra fonts. Finally I will explain how to configure the Pentaho Reporting Engine and the Pentaho Report Designer.
0. Prerequisites
The Pentaho Reporting Engine requires Java 1.5.0 installed on your system. The Java Runtime environment used must be fully compliant to the Java standard.
The Pentaho Report Designer requires at least JDK 1.6.0.
GNU GCJ, the standard java environment used in Red Hat Linux will NOT work, as it does not implement critical parts of the Java standard API. We have no information how good the other free Java implementations follow the standard, and therefore we cannot make any guarantees on them.
Where ever possible use a standard conforming Java Runtime System. The Sun/Oracle JDK, OpenJDK and the IBM JDKs are known to work flawlessly.
Windows:
The Oracle Java Runtime can be downloaded from Java.com.
Ubuntu Linux 10.4:
Install the package "openjdk-6-jdk" and then update the internal configuration links to always use the OpenJDK as default.
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
sudo update-alternatives --config java
Ubuntu Linux 9.10 or older; Debian Stable (lenny)
Install the package "sun-java6-jdk" and then update the internal configuration links to always use Sun's JDK as default.
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
sudo update-alternatives --config java
SuSE Linux
Install the package "java-1_6_0-openjdk" via YaST.
Fedora Linux
Install the package "java-1.6.0-openjdk".
MacOS-X
Every Mac comes with a pre-installed Java Runtime environment. You are perfectly prepared.
1. Download the Pentaho Report Designer
The various versions of Pentaho Report Designer can be downloaded from the JFreeReport project on Sourceforge
2. Installation
The Pentaho Report Designer download is a archive file that needs to be extracted before the report designer can run. Use your operating system's unzip tool to extract the report-designer and run either the *.bat (Windows) or *.sh (Linux) file.
During the first start the Pentaho Report Designer will initialize the local configuration in $HOME/.pentaho.
Windows
Unzip the downloaded ZIP-archive by double clicking on it.
Copy the "report-designer" directory from the ZIP file to your "Program Files" directory.
You can start the Pentaho Report Designer with the "report-designer.bat" file.
Linux (all versions)
After downloading the tar.gz or zip file, extract the contents.
tar -zxf prd-ce-3.7.0-stable.tar.gz
or
unzip prd-ce-3.7.0-stable.zip
This will create a "report-designer" directory.
Within the report-designer directory, execute "report-designer.sh" to launch the Pentaho Report Designer.
The report-designer must be run from within your X11-environment (for instance a XTerm window). It cannot be run from a text-console. Make sure that you have a Java 1.6.0 Runtime installed.
MacOS-X
After the download is complete, you will find the download archive in your "Downloads" folder.
Extract the contents of the downloaded file. To extract the file, double click on the file in the Finder.
Drag the Report Designer into /Applications
4. Installing database drivers
Pentaho Reporting requires JDBC drivers to communicate with the database system. Each database vendor should provide suitable drivers for their databases. If your database vendor does not provide JDBC drivers, it may be possible to use ODBC drivers via the JDBC-ODBC bridge driver that comes with the JDK. However, in most cases, such connections suffer from various bugs in the underlying driver system. If your database does not support JDBC access and the ODBC drivers do not work properly, then Pentaho Reporting is not able to access your data.
Your only option would be to switch to a different database or a different reporting product.
Installing JDBC drivers is simple. Copy the driver, in many cases a *.jar file, into the "lib/jdbc" directory within Pentaho Report Designer's installation directory. If you are using the Pentaho BI-Server, you will also have to install the same driver into the BI-Server's application server.
Suitable drivers for MySQL, H2 and HypersonicSQL are already included in the download.
Downloading Drivers
|
Oracle |
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/jdbc/index-091264.html |
|
MS-SQL-Server |
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/aa937724.aspx or http://jtds.sourceforge.net/ |
|
PostreSQL |
5. (Optional) Configuring JNDI data sources
When storing the data source connection information inside the report can cause severe maintainability problems later. Each report contains its own copy of the connection information. If that information changes (for example if the database moves to a different host), all reports referencing that database must be changed manually.
In many companies report designer also do not have access to the databases that store the real data. To make sure that reports can be moved safely from the development environment to the testing environment, the data source information must be stored outside of the report.
JNDI is a method of separating data source configuration information from the actual use of the data source. Each data source has a unique name, under which the reporting engine can find the actual connection. A JNDI provider (usually part of a application infrastructure) manages all data sources and is responsible for connecting to the database.
Within the Pentaho Report Designer, you can define your common data sources in a local configuration file. The JNDI configuration for the Pentaho Report Designer is stored "$HOME/.pentaho/simple-jndi". Editing the contents of "report-designer/configuration-template/simple-jndi" has no effect, as the report designer is not using that directory at runtime.
The Pentaho BI-Server uses its own configuration. You can edit the BI-Server's configuration via the BI-Server's Administration Console.
Within the "simple-jndi" directory, edit a file called "default.properties", which should list all your data sources.
The general template for a data source definition is:
(text written in italics need to be replaced with suitable values)
name/type=javax.sql.DataSource
name/driver=database driver
name/user=database username
name/password=database password
name/url=jdbc-url