Monthly Archives: October 2008

How to Disable Drill Through on Pentaho Charts

I have some dashboard pages which show charts that are purely informational. They don’t need to click to anywhere. In fact, since I’m loading these charts via AJAX calls I do not want them to be linked. I want them to be images without any URLs and no clicks.

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All of those bars / lines etc I just want to have hovers (to see the values, but no click through locations).

However, after looking through all the documentation and code for it, I couldn’t find a single way to suppress the generation of hyperlinks for the charts. Sure, I could get the image from the ChartComponent but then I wouldn’t get the hover values. Until it occurred to me. Why not just make a URL link that does nothing?

Adding the following fragment to the chart definition can make the link, in essence, do nothing and not even refresh the page. Meets my needs.

<use-base-url>false</use-base-url>
<url-template>javascript:;</url-template>

Not ideal though. It still shows the user a clickable area so the user may think the application isn’t working properly. I think BISERVER-2222 will be better in the long term but a stop gap measure that helps my customers for sure.

It is FINALLY here – Manage Datasources

Since the very first time I downloaded the Pentaho suite I’ve been wailing, screaming, shouting, snarking that there absolutely MUST be a way to manage data sources that does not involve XML.

Well… Holy Shit. At just under 3 years it’s here (Pentaho Administration Console from 2.0.M3 build):

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This is a most appreciated feature for those getting started with Pentaho! Thank you to the Pentaho Engineers for whipping it up!
PS – It’s not perfect yet, but should be solid by 2.0 GA