What is Adhoc Reporting?

Adhoc Reporting is a report generation tool based on Web 2.0 technology (AJAX, DHTML) designed to help typical business users easily generate adhoc reports using the Pentaho BI platform. It provides a user interface that helps the user quickly identify and group the data of interest, apply constraints to the data, and generate a report. The resulting reports are viewable through Adhoc Reporting's Preview feature, or through a Pentaho-platform based web application.

Quick Start with Adhoc Reporting and the PCI

In order to develop an understanding of Adhoc Reporting's capabilities, let's run Adhoc Reporting with the Pentaho Pre-Configured Install (PCI) to create a few simple reports. We need to first download and install the PCI.  Adhoc Reporting is included as part of the PCI install.
Let's create a simple report using Adhoc Reporting and the PCI.

Creating a Useful Report Using Adhoc Reporting

Creating the simple report is a useful exercise for learning the basics of Adhoc Reporting. However, a report with one detail column is probably not very useful. Let's refine the simple report so that it displays more useful information.

Refining the Report

The report is now displaying useful information. In addition to displaying useful information, we would like to:

• Specify summary information for certain details columns.
• Constrain the data in the report so that we are only reporting on products that have shipped.
• Specify the sort order for Customername and Quantity Ordered.
• Specify report-wide information, like headers and footers, page orientation, paper, and a description of our report.

Templates

Adhoc Reporting supports the use of templates as a mechanism for defining a common appearance or style shared by a group of reports. Adhoc Reporting comes with a set of predefined templates. Users can create and deploy their own templates.

Operations on an Existing Report

The BI Platform supports the following operations on existing reports:

• Editing an Existing Report
• Deleting a Report from the Repository
• Running a Report

Preparing the Pentaho BI Platform to Support Adhoc Reporting

Many reporting tools interact directly with an RDBMS to get to their reporting data. Instead of going directly to the RDBMS for reporting data, Adhoc Reporting interacts with an intermediate metadata layer. This metadata layer in the Pentaho BI platform must exist and be properly configured before using Adhoc Reporting to generate reports.

Localizing Adhoc Reporting

Adhoc Reporting's user interface is internationalized to support users whose preferred language is not English. You'll need to follow these steps if you would like to localize Adhoc Reporting for your locale.