Learning Pentaho CTools

Book Description:

Pentaho and CTools are two of the fastest and most rapidly growing tools for practical solutions not found in any other tool available on the market. Using Pentaho allows you to build a complete analytics solution, and CTools brings an advanced flexibility to customizing them in a remarkable way.

The book starts with the basics of the framework and how to get data to your dashboards. We’ll take you all the way through to creating custom and advanced dashboards and creating an effective visual impact to provide the best user experience. Further, you will learn core concepts about the Community Dashboards Framework, how to create a custom dashboard using the Community Dashboards Editor, and how to use data sources to load data into the components. You will start with the basic components and will move on to the most advanced components where you can build your own visualizations. You will then learn how to build a plugin without writing Java code, using Pentaho App Builder as a CPK plugin manager. There is a chapter about the Community Charts Components that will explain some basic and advanced concepts that will allow you to keep improving your knowledge about it. Finally, the reader will learn how to embed dashboards into other applications, and some considerations about deployment and version control.

What You Will Learn

• Install Community Tools on Pentaho and understand the necessary concepts and considerations when creating an exciting dashboard design
• Use Community Data Access (CDA) as the data abstraction layer and understand the concepts of the Community Dashboard Framework (CDF)
• Understand how the listeners and parameters work to create interaction between components
• Make use of the out-of-the-box feature and customize Community Charts Components
• Customize and create interaction between all components, including charts, using Community Charts Components
• Create and embed dashboards in a new and better way
• Create plugins without writing Java code