JNDI Connection - Pentaho Report Designer

As a major design principle, we have always encouraged developers to move away from using hardcoded hostnames and use JNDI instead. Major reason for that being that the code remains loosely coupled with the configuration files. You would not need to rebuild your code if there are changes and it acts like a macro which can be used anywhere throughout the code driven by configuration.

Follow the below steps for configuring Pentaho Report Designer to use the JNDI connection. For this example, I will take the MySQL Connection as an example.

Step - 1: JDBC Driver

The JDBC Driver should reside in the location - lib/jdbc at the path where your report designer is installed or extracted. Thus, to provide a mysql connectivity to your report designer, download the mysql-connector and place it in that path.

Step - 2: Configuring JDBC Connection and Setting JNDI Properties

When installing Pentaho, it always creates a hidden directory inside the User Home where it keeps it's configuration files.

Windows - c:/Users//.pentaho
Linux/Mac - $HOME/.pentaho

Inside this directory, you should be able to find the file ".pentaho/simple-jndi/default.properties". Open this file and edit it as follows. Your JNDI is not SampleData

Step - 3: Report Designer Configuration

Watch the below video for Report Designed Configuration

Pentaho BI 101 - Pentaho CTools Installation in 3 different ways

One of the most important advantages of Open Source BI tools is that you can have plenty of people working and contributing different kinds of plugins to enable unimaginable scenarios. CTools was started by a company called WebDetails with one such idea to make a host of small and useful plugins and make pentaho more acceptable to developers. WebDetails was recently bought by Pentaho and in versions to come, we might see the entire toolset as a part of distribution itself.

As part of this blog, we would see 3 different ways to install CTools plugins. You may ask why 3 different ways? Well, the simple answer to that is its open source and it follows TIMTOWDI(There is more than one way to do it). You would also understand it why as you go through this post and video tutorial on YouTube.

1. ctools-installer.sh - This is a very strong choice for *nix developers. However, for Windows and Mac, you might need to install necessary tools to be able to run this shell script. Windows might need CygWin to run and Mac users need "wget" utility and can refer here to install it. On Mac however, the pre-requisite is to download and install XCode library from AppStore which is a 2GB install in itself. 
2. Individual plugins using JAR files - This is a very simple approach and there are no pre-reqs required except JAVA which you would already have since you have installed Pentaho. However, you might need to install each plugin manually and thus its feasible if you need only one or two.
3. Pentaho MarketPlace - MarketPlace is an always welcomed approach in any toolset. This also is by far the simplest approach to installing/maintaining and administering the plugin versions across your installations. PS:- This is not working at the moment(without proxy as well). This used to work 2 months back nicely. Refer Bug Report

Thus based on your choice of installation, please go ahead and choose one of the methods above.

CTools-installer Link - https://github.com/pmalves/ctools-installer

CTools Individual Installers - http://www.webdetails.pt/ctools.html

Pentaho MarketPlace - http://ci.pentaho.com/ and choose marketplace 4.8 or 5.0 depending on your version.

Pentaho BI 101 - Getting Started Series

As part of the first series on the DWBI Pub channel on YouTube, I have started to cover the Pentaho BI getting started series. The motive is to help people scale up to Open Source technologies, learn and contribute to real world projects.

As part of the getting started series, I would cover all aspects of Pentaho Business Intelligence and then take each component at a time and help people learn and deliver on real world projects. I hope to share as well as increase my knowledge while working on this series.

You can subscribe to my channel as well as add the playlist to give you most updated information as I upload more videos.

Topics in the Series (Update: Jan 27, 2014)

1. Introduction Part 1
2. Introduction Part 2
3. CTools Installation