Chapter 13. Environment Variables, Stylesheets, and Crosstabs

This chapter is dedicated to environment variables, stylesheets, and crosstabs. We will treat each of them in detail, defining what they are about and how to implement them in Pentaho Report Designer (PRD).

Using Environment Variables allows us to interact with the BA Server that is executing our reports. That is, we can obtain the username of the user who is currently logged in and his or her roles, among other information.

With Style Sheets, we can configure our report so that its look and feel varies according to certain CSS Rules . These CSS Rules are easy to configure, save, and import.

Finally, we will take a look at one of PRD's new jewels, Crosstabs . Using Crosstabs, we can show OLAP-style analytic information in our reports.

In this chapter we will do the following:

• See examples of environment variables and use them to configure our objects in order to create CSS Rules for them

• Create a new stylesheet and add our own...