Clarification requested on various Reporting Tools

[ktukker]

Hi,

After installing the platform, I am looking into what Reporting tools to use. With the Pentaho umbrella, I've discovered quite a lot of variation:

* Pentaho Design Studio
- Basic Eclipse with some pentaho plugins
* Standalone Eclipse plugins
* ReportDesigner

- Classic report engine
- New report engine

Could somebody point to a explanation of the various products? They seem to have overlap with each other. Which will be phased out or reimplemented?

With kind regards,

Klaasjan

[zach]

Use the Report Designer to create the report template, test the outcome and see how it will look in the platform. Publish the report to xml and xaction into your workspace (I put my pentaho solutions directory within my Eclipse workspace). Once you have published them into the pentaho solutions directory, you should be able to see them from the platform (via http://localhost:8080/pentaho). If you would like to do more advanced things, like prompts, you then go into the design studio and add them to the xaction.

The xaction document is the "umbrella" that ties various components of the penthao platform together and this is what the plugins in eclipse (automatically included in the design studio- the design studio is an eclipse distro) allow you to read in a nicer format then straight xml.

[Taqua]

Hi,

if you are using the Platform, then you automatically use the classic-engine. The flow-engine is a work-in-progress, it will take some time before it becomes stable enough to be part of the Platform.

If your reports are not parametrized, you can ignore the design studio and just use the Report-Designer or Report-Wizard directly. They generate the necessary action-sequence documents when you publish the reports to the server.

The difference between the designer and the wizard is simple: The wizard uses a simple 7-step process to generate rather generic reports based on a given query. You can select the columns, add a couple of aggregations to the group footers, maybe a chart, and that's it. The report-designer, on the other hand, gives you full control over the report design at the price that creating the reports becomes more complicated and that you have to position the elements and everything else manually. (However, the wizard is now integrated into the designer, so you can bootstrap your report with the wizard, and then customize it with the designer.)

Both the wizard and the designer help you to create report-definitions. These definitions describe how the report will look like, but they do not tell the system what actually happens with the generated content.

If you want to have parametrized reports, to bursting or send the reports by mail, you have to use the design-studio to define the action-sequence. The action-sequence is a kind of workflow-description and defines all input parameters and tells the system what needs to be done to get your reports to the consumer. The design-studio's documentation should tell you more about what action-sequences are and what you can do with them. (Sometimes in the forum and the documenation, you will see the term "XAction". An XAction is just the xml-file where an action-sequence is described.)

Have fun,
said Thomas