Learning Pentaho CTools

About This Book

• Learn everything you need to know to make the most of CTools
• Create interactive and remarkable dashboards using the CTools
• Understand how to use and create data visualizations that can make the difference
• The author of our book works for Pentaho as a Senior Consultant
• Acts as a follow-up to Packt’s previously published products on Pentaho such as Pentaho Business Analytics Cookbook, Pentaho Analytics for MongoDB, Pentaho Data Integration Cookbook – Second Edition, and Pentaho Reporting [Video]
• Our book is based on the latest version of Pentaho, that is, 6.0

Who This Book Is For

If you are a CTools developer and would like to expand your knowledge and create attractive dashboards and frameworks, this book is the go-to-guide for you. A basic knowledge of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is highly recommended.

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

In Detail

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with CTools
Chapter 2: Acquiring Data with CDA
Chapter 3: Building the Dashboard Using CDF
Chapter 4: Leverage the Process with CDE
Chapter 5: Applying Filters to the Dashboard
Chapter 6: Tables, Templates, Exports, and Text Components
Chapter 7: Advanced Concepts Using CDF and CDE
Chapter 8: Visualizations Using CCC
Chapter 9: Pentaho App Builder
Chapter 10: Embed, Deploy, and Debug