Including charts in reports
Including charts in your Pentaho reports makes a difference because of two main reasons: it's powerful and it's easy. Pentaho charts are powerful because they give you the ability to represent complex information in a single image (the chart itself) with many different styles. They are easy because the inclusion of chart in a report can be easily done with a configuration (and not development), starting from a data source.
Note
Pentaho Reporting relies on JFreeChart. The JFreeChart project was founded in February 2000 and today it is the most widely used chart library for Java, with more than 2.2 million downloads to date.
To add charts to your report, drag the chart icon (
) from the Report Designer palette and drop it in the place where you want to see the chart. Usually, a chart is placed in a grouping band like Report Header
or Group Header
(and rarely on footers or Page Header
). This is because a chart makes sense if used on a collection of data and not on single...