Downloading

The Pentaho Report Design Wizard is available for download on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=140317&package_id=175834 as a compressed zip file.

Installation

Unzip the Report Design Wizard archive to a location you can remember. For example, a good choice, on Windows, may be C:\pentaho-reportwizard. From this point forward, the installation path is referred to as {WIZARD-ROOT}. Pentaho recommends that to follow this documentation, you must install the Pentaho sample data available from Sourceforge at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pentaho/pentaho_sample_data-1.6.0.GA.863.zip?modtime=1191930234&big_mirror=0. The sample data zip file contains Hypersonic database that you must start by clicking the start-hypersonic.bat (Windows) or start-hypersonic.sh (*NIX). The Hypersonic database is referenced throughout this documentation.

Configuration

The Report Design Wizard is distributed as a zip archive and comes pre-configured; other than unzipping the archive, there is no installation process or configuration required.

If you are using JNDI  edit {WIZARD-ROOT}/ resources/solutions/system/simple-jndi/jdbc.properties. A sample entry is shown below:

SampleData/type=javax.sql.DataSource
SampleData/driver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
SampleData/url=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/sampledata
SampleData/user=pentaho_user
SampleData/password=password

SampleData is the name of the JNDI connection being set up; all of the name/value pairs configure the pertinent connection information. The */type setting allows JNDI to recognize what is being managed — in this case, a SQL datasource. The */driver setting is the JDBC driver class name for the database being accessed. The */url is the JDBC connect string, the example shown above is for a Hypersonic database server running locally. The next two settings are the user's credentials for logging in to the database if required.

Database driver setup only requires that the drivers be located in the {WIZARD-ROOT}/lib/jdbc directory. A Hypersonic database driver is included with the Report Design Wizard under {WIZARD-ROOT}/lib/jdbc. Additional drivers may be dropped into this same location and are picked up by the application automatically. 

The easiest type of connection to create is an XQuery connection. Using an XML data-file and a query you can walk through the wizard and generate a report-spec. There is an XML data-file in {WIZARD-ROOT}/samples/data called Quad_Data.xml.  This file contains the same data that is in the Hypersonic database.

Launching

To launch the Report Design Wizard, use the included launch scripts (reportWizard.bat on Windows, reportwizard_linux.sh for Linux, and reportwizard_osx.sh for Mac).

The starting point allows you to create a report from scratch or to work on an existing report.  The Report Design Wizard supports templates that are pre-defined report definitions (layouts) for specific types of reports (for example,  Customer Invoices) and require the user to enter 'mappings'.

The Report Name field is used to set the name of the report in the JFreeReport XML definition and as a file name to create in the temporary Pentaho solution path while generating previews.  When a report is exported, several files are copied to the specified path.  These files are the JFreeReport XML definition, the Pentaho Report-Spec document, images used by the report (watermark), and the action sequence document necessary to run the report by the Pentaho Solution engine.