I agree with Nicholas about the charting. I was able to create a chart with the wizard, but I cannot with the report designer. I have looked for documentation and only found references to the wizard. Please leave a link or a howto on the process of creating and embedding charts with the report designer.

Thanks

Thanks for the great blog.

I am looking for a tool that could generate reports from a warehouse, preferably with ‘drill up & down’ feature.
I would like to specify the dimmensions and facts tables, select the colums I am interested in and start drilling.
Can Pentaho do that?
Perhaps you know the tool, which is good for that?

Best regards,
Valdas

Any chance you have an example on how to do a bar & line chart ?
I have tried all the combinations I could think of but the charts always come out blank.
I am trying to chart date/value or string/value pairs.

Thanks

That’s a great intro into the report designer. I ran acrost your experiences with pentaho training when I was trying to find out an easy way to make cross tab reports in pentaho so I poked around a bit on the site. I defently think that the designer will be an awesome addition to the pentaho SOA just like kettle was. And allowing the use of BIRT 2.0 will be great as well. Any idea what your next pentaho tip might be?

Thanks,

Nic

btw: very nice blog!

I checked with our engineering team and the BIRT 2.0 is on the roadmap and will likely (things change) be addressed in the next quarter or so. One of the benefits of open source is that you’re welcome to chart your own course if our course doesn’t suit you. If you need BIRT 2.0 urgently you’re welcome to implement it yourself. If so, my only advice is to “touch base” with Pentaho chief geek ahead of implementation — the Pentaho developers have deep experience in all three report engines so could offer good advice in that regard.

Happy Reporting!

re: Images, I just opened with Internet Explorer and it worked fine. Weird. I’ll keep an eye on that over time to see if there’s something diff about image posts from Firefox/IE.

re: the Pentaho Designer. I just recently joined and I’m not one of the product managers so I don’t know precisely how buying this product was decided upon. Let me share what I do know:

While Pentaho can schedule, parameterize, and burst Jasper and BIRT reports this is for customer choice; people like yourself are keen on BIRT. That’s great, we think we can add value for anyone who needs a “full BI solution” instead of just a reporting engine. I’m guessing that we will upgrade to 2.0 at some point (again, not in Engineering) and continue to support the BIRT reports for customers that choose it.

Our informal (we didn’t control variables, etc) testing and experience with integrating all THREE reports into the platform was that JFree was superior in a few key areas. Performance was significantly better in volume, the modularity/architecture was a benefit. Pentaho “acquired” JFree for several reasons but the least of which is probably the need for a great engine that really just needed some GUI, enhancements to be the top open source Reporting engine. I DO NOT want to assert that JFree is a better engine than Jasper or BIRT… They are both fine engines and we continue to offer them as a choice to our customers.

So, I suppose it’s a matter of investing in the reporting engine that will work easily and perform best inside of Pentaho. We could repackage BIRT Designer but that adds no value; community members are able to use it if they wish (of course, as soon as we’ve upgraded to 2.0).

I’ll pass along your request to upgrade to BIRT 2.0 in the platform; sounds like a good idea so I’m sure it’s just a priority thing.

Kind Regards,
Nick