Report Design Wizard
Introduction
The Pentaho Report Design Wizard was created to facilitate report authoring. The Report Design Wizard is designed to bridge the gap between not having a report authoring tool and having a full-fledged report designer.
If you are a first-time user of the Report Designer, you will enjoy the ease of use and power of the Report Design Wizard. If you are an expert, you will appreciate the time you save by using the wizard even when minor manual tweaking is required.
The Pentaho Report Design Wizard uses the BI Platform provided by Pentaho to manage report data and to execute the Pentaho Reporting Engine (formerly JFreeReport Engine) to generate report previews. To download the BI Platform see http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=140317 for additional documentation. It is possible to take reports and action sequences generated by the Report Design Wizard and deploy them in a Pentaho BI solution with a variety of benefits such as scheduling, bursting, work flow, and email forwarding of reports.
An Overview of Pentaho Reporting
Pentaho Reporting (formerly JFree Report) consists of several major sections that define the layout and content of a report. These sections are usually defined in the following order: Report Header/Footer, Page Header/Footer, Group Headers/Footers, Items or Details and a section of functions or expressions.
The Report header and footer are printed at the beginning and end of a report, respectively. A Report header generally displays information about the report itself such as a title, the report run date, and report parameters.
Page headers and footers are printed at the beginning and end of each and every page of a report. They usually contain page number but can also include report parameters and any other report components. The current Report Design Wizard does not allow you to create or manipulate page headers or footers.
A group header typically displays the name of the column and the current value of the column for the group. A report is divided into sections of groups, repeating headers and footers for each iteration of the group. If any column calculations are being performed, there will be a group footer with the calculated values. To give calculated values for an entire column across all groups, the wizard has an option for Grand Totals.
The items section defines the columns that belong to the same group. The items section repeats for each row in the query. This is where the actual values from the query appear.
As discussed in the paragraph about calculations in group headers and footers, a report may have calculated values, such as subtotaling a column. These calculations are defined in terms of functions or expressions in a section called, Functions. The Report Design Wizard generates the functions required by the report. The Pentaho Report Design Wizard is capable of producing moderately complex reports that meet most expectations.
License
The Pentaho Report Design Wizard is distributed as Open Source under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). A copy of the license is available at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.txt.