Creating a dashboard with Pentaho reports
In Chapter 14, Building Interactive Reports, we discussed limiting the advanced interaction between reports to avoid failing projects. When interactions between visual elements become complex, the dashboards are probably the suggested solution. In the Pentaho suite, the right place to develop dashboards is the Business Analytics Platform, with the support of the CTools. CTools is a set of tools and components created to help you build custom dashboards on top of Pentaho. There are specific CTools for different purposes, but we will only introduce them as an example, considering they need an entire book to describe all the possibilities and nice features. Our goal in this section is to show an example of a dashboard, using the Pentaho reports as elements.
Community dashboard editor basics
A core part of the CTools, the Community Dashboard Editor (CDE), is included in the Pentaho user console as a graphical tool for creating, editing, and previewing...