Creating a Pentaho report with data coming from PDI

The Pentaho Reporting Engine allows designing, creating, and distributing reports in various popular formats (HTML, PDF, and so on) from different kind of sources (JDBC, OLAP, XML, and so on).

There are occasions where you need other kinds of sources such as text files or Excel files, or situations where you must process the information before using it in a report. In those cases, you can use the output of a Kettle transformation as the source of your report. This recipe shows you this capability of the Pentaho Reporting Engine.

For this recipe, you will develop a very simple report: The report will ask for a city and a temperature scale and will report the current conditions in that city. The temperature will be expressed in the selected scale.

Getting ready

A basic understanding of the Pentaho Report Designer tool is required in order to follow this recipe. You should be able to create a report, add parameters, build a simple report, and...