Thursday, August 25, 2011

Pentaho reporting and canned reports for distributed solutions

So recently I came across a use case that I helped someone work through that I thought my audience would find useful. Here it is;

Use Case

A company wants to offer Pentaho as the BI Application with their current solution. As part of this solution they want to create some canned reports that has the logo of the customer that is using their solution. Each customer will have the same report, because it is a report that is common across all their customers, however, they want the logo on the report to be that of the customer. Additionally, the solution is installed on premise at each individual customer site so the location of their solution in relation to the web application will be different for each customer (in other words, the installation and configuration of the Pentaho BI Server is different at each customer). In order to accomplish this in Report Designer, they must do the following steps:

  1. Place an image in the report

  2. Put the location of that image as an Open Formula consisting of: =[env::serverBaseURL] & "/pentaho/GetResource?resource=solution/folder_path/image_name.png


Here is a video presentation demonstrating this:






1 comment:

Mike Bosch said...

Google Explanation. Thanks for that image.