On Friday without much ado, Pentaho uploaded the Release Candidate 1 of Pentaho Reporting 3.8.1 to the Sourceforge servers. This bug-fix release contains only bug-fixes, among the more noteworthy we have PRD-3349 and PRD-3375 (Numbers rounded wrongly) and some changes to the parameter handling so that cascading prompts get more usable inside the report designer and the Pentaho BI-Server.

Full list of all cases closed in this release

Download: Download Pentaho Report Designer 3.8.1-RC1

Shortly after the release of Pentaho Reporting 3.8, we got reports that the nasty rounding error introduced in PRD-3.7 (PRD-3080) partially survived the surgery.

The bug caused rounding errors when we formatted and displayed numbers in a report and I highly advice anyone to install this patch.

Even though all patches and binaries of the bugfix releases are always available to our paying customers via the Pentaho support, I consider this one critical enough to make this patch available to the global community as well.

So grab the patch to the patch:
http://www.sherito.org/downloads/libformat-1.2.4.jar

Patch Installation

Place this jar into both into your Pentaho Report Designer and BI-Server library directory.

For Pentaho Report Designer

(1) locate the “lib” directory in the Report Designer Installation directory
(2) delete the “libformat-1.2.3.jar” file.
(3) copy the “libformat-1.2.4.jar” file you just downloaded into this lib-directory.

For the Pentaho BI-Platform

(1) locate the “biserver-ee/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/lib” directory in your BI-Server Installation directory.
(2) delete the “libformat-1.2.3.jar” file.
(3) copy the “libformat-1.2.4.jar” file you just downloaded into this lib-directory.

After that, restart your BI-Server and your Pentaho Report Designer.

When you download the latest build (3.8-branch) of the Pentaho Report Designer and the BI-Server, you may* notice some lovely changes. Its not the look, its not the feel. Its the speed, baby!

Before 3.8, each time parameter changed and the report had to re-render, we had to generate the report twice. One run happened when asking for the parameter-document for displaying the number of pages in the page-selector in the parameter-viewer. And then a second run happened to get you that fancy single page report output.

If your report needed a minute to run, you had to wait two minutes for your results. Now, unless you are in the business of selling coffee to co-workers waiting for reports, this is not good.

With the upcoming 3.8-release (end of February, I have been told), I introduced two measures to make working with reports faster.

The Server Side Report Cache

From now on the report that has been paginated is held in a per-user cache on the user’s session for some time. This makes sure that the paginated report object survives the time between the parameter request (where pagination happens) and the actual content-rendering request. If we can render from a paginated report, we have the report’s result-set available and have the report pre-processed to already contain the page information. At that point, producing the content is fast and simple.

Expect to have the same report browsing speed in the BI-Server as you have in the report preview inside the report-designer.

And of course: If you don’t like caching for some or all of your reports, you can disable the cache either globally (via the pentahoObjects.xml file) or on a per-report basis (via an attribute on the master-report object).

I apologize to all upcoming coffee entrepreneurs who I put out of business with this move. Put the blame of the next recession on me, I can handle it.

The Data Cache

From time to time I get complaints that validating the parameters is slow too.

Usually I hear that in conjunction with list-parameters driven by database queries. Parameter queries are supposed to return fairly small result-sets. In the classical business intelligence world, these parameter are driven by dimension tables. In a datawarehouse, dimension tables are reasonable small (compared to the size of the fact table) and hopefully have a reasonable index on them.

But not everyone believes in that. Some do things different ..

And thus I see parameter being driven by SQL statements as verbose as works of Shakespeare, with nasty constructs and pure evilness dripping out of the query code.

We can rule out to educate our users, for one single reason: Reporting is not Business Intelligence.

Reporting is getting your numbers on paper and when people start with that, they do not think about “Business Intelligence”. They think about getting their report done so that they can go home. They surely do “Business Intelligence” in the process, but they don’t see that. Writing Mondrian-Schema files and doing Data Integration is “Business Intelligence”. This is what the incomprehensible geeks from the IT department are for. But a business user, a analyst or a office assistant could not care less about that. If it works, its fine. If it works badly, it is still fine, as I can go home once it is done.

So I ventured out to find a technical solution to a organizational and people problem.

The Data Cache!

The data-cache is a global cache that holds cached result-sets in memory. Right now, we simply ship with some reasonable default implementations.

Within the report-designer, this is a global cache, holding copies of the result-sets. To make sure we do not run out of memory this cache is limited to result-sets with less than 10.000** rows of data and will cache up to 50** result-sets with a last-recently-used strategy.

It will not cache your latest 4 million rows full-table scan. If you need that to be faster, talk to one of the many Pentaho Partners for getting a proper datawarehouse set up. It will not cache result-sets coming from a scripting datasource, a Java method call, a table-datasource, a external datasource (results computed in a xaction) or a CDA datasource. In all of those cases there is either no point in caching (as caching is more expensive than producing) or because we have not enough hints on the involved query-parameters.

When the cache kicks in, parameter validation with abusive queries will be a lot faster. For everyone else, working with the data-tab in the Pentaho Report Designer will be smoother now. There is no coffee break penalty for adding expressions anymore. The only time queries are fired now are at the report start-up and when you edit either the report’s active query or the connection information of your currently active data-source.

Now there are a truck-load of good reasons to head for the upcoming 3.8-release. For now: Happy reporting!

*) Unless you are using steel-wheels driven reports from the in-memory database where response times are infinitely fast.

**) These numbers can be changed in the global report configuration (classic-engine.properties)

First: Let me thank you for your great support for staying with a software that now is 3 years old.

In September 2009 we finally released the ground breaking Pentaho Reporting 3.5.0 (Citrus). We fully integrated the Pentaho Report Designer into the Pentaho Reporting product family and enabled non-technical business users to create reports easier than ever. In that release we switched away from the JFreeReport product name. All future releases have been and will be known as the “Pentaho Reporting” product family.

So far you have not been tempted to upgrade despite our huge improvements in productivity, performance and potential benefits to your business. Let me show you some of them:

Your users will find the improved user interface of the Report Designer easier to use than the old Report Designer.

• They will be able to create better reports without the help of your technical support or database administrators.
• They can get the information they want whenever they want – now – instead of having to file a ticket, wait, file another ticket for corrections and eventually get their report.
• The new elements and layouting options (Sparklines, Barcodes, better charts and Side-by-side-subreports) help your users to visualize their information better and to design the reports they need to be successful.
• The new built-in parameter support enables them to produce reports that answer the questions they encounter in their working day faster than ever.

Your developers and power users will find complete and accurate documentation in Will Gorman’s book “Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers” describing all the properties and classes you need to get started faster.

This improved productivity could be yours! But so far you decided to ignore that value for your business and your career ..

But here is a sad truth: After three years of great success, my active support for these old releases comes to an end. With my limited resources I cannot provide bug-fixes, answers to support questions, samples or documentation.

If you decide to stay with the old versions of Pentaho Reporting, formerly known as JFreeReport, I wish you great success and say farewell.

But if you need assistance to upgrade your code base and have questions on how to best proceed, please come to the Pentaho Forum and post your question there. Don’t forget to add “Upgrade question:” to your posting title, and the Pentaho community and I will help you to make the upgrade as smooth as possible.

Thomas Morgner

A few days ago, Xpand IT published the sources of a very cool Confluence plugin at the Confluence Plugin Repository

Confluence is a Enterprise Wiki from the creators of the excellent JIRA bugtracker. The plugin allows to embed HTML content generated by the Pentaho Reporting Engine into any Wiki page. Now this makes it ridiculous easy to create data-driven web-sites.

Once you installed the plugin, using it is very simple. Just insert the macro

{PentahoReport:reportFile=myfile.prpt}

into the Wiki page and you will see the report’s content.

Thank you, Xpand IT!

Finally, after a long long time, we are once more close to release a new version of the Pentaho Reporting tools.

There are a couple of new things in this release, so lets start with the obvious one:

Drill-Linking

The Drill-Linking extensions give you a user-friendly way to define URLs that point to other reports or XActions and to parametrize those URLs properly. Earlier versions were not really fun to use in that respect. You had to memorize the long and ugly and complex URL of the XAction or Report and then you had to conjure up some formula magic to fill in your parameters. And for that, you need to remember all the quazillion various parameters that target report declared. And everything was fine as long as you did not attempt to pass multi-selection parameters, which open up a totally new hell of URL computation. And remember to URL-encode your parameters or you are in trouble as well. Arghh!

These days, this task is a lot easier. Open up the hyperlink editor by selecting your element and hitting “Format->Hyperlink..”. Select what kind of link you want to produce. Enter the target file name or target base URL. Add the parameters by hitting the green plus. Fill in all the parameter names and values. Done.

For XActions and PRPTs, hit the large blue “network” icon to refresh the parameter view and you will see all your declared parameters coming in. (Note: For GA, this will change to auto-populate, as manual work is soooo 1980!)

RC1-Caveat: Make sure you enter a correct formula in the parameter values. Just entering “hello” will result in a error, static strings must be quoted. For GA (and in the CI-builds) this is fixed already and the ordinary Excel semantic of editing cells and formulas applies: = starts a formula, ‘ starts a text and everything else will be automatically checked for its type.

Charts and images can finally have a image map to provide tooltips and links on hot areas of the generated image.

Tame your parameter and your BI-Server’s report viewer

The BI-Server viewer has become a lot smarter these days and you can now exercise tight control over the auto-submit checkbox (is it there, and what is its value), the available export types and much more.

In the next blog posting I will demonstrate how to limit the output types that are shown to the user to just a few ones.

For date parameter you are now able to specify the time-zone it should use. This removes a lot of ambiguity on what date or time you are actually specifying when selecting a date.

The post-processing and available values for your parameter are now also cleanly defined and thus make sure that every parameter uses the selected values of the preceding parameters for its work.

All power to the Charts

The new post-processing expression on the charts finally unlocks the full power of JFreeChart for the reporting engine. With that expression you gain raw access to the JFreeChart object. Sure, this is raw access, and thus not for everyone. Granny wont be willing to go down there, but all the consultants who need to “get a job done(tm)” will appreciate its power.

A chart without a series name will finally auto-generate one. This simple change removes one of the major stumbling blocks for new users and makes sure you get to your results faster.

Index and Table-Of-Contents

The index and table-of-contents feature that I prototyped some time ago got a good and hard trashing and hardening by Gunter Rombauts and thus finally carries the seal of “approved for daily use”. (Note: Some of the fixes are only in the CI version.)

New formula functions

• MULTIVALUEQUERY: Queries a array of values from a datasource
• SINGLEVALUEQUERY: Queries a single of value from a datasource
• MPARAMETERTEXT: produces a HTTP/HTML multi-selection parameter prompt
• PARAMETERTEXT: produces a HTTP/HTML single-selection parameter prompt
• QUOTETEXT: encodes any text as XML, JavaScript, HTML or formula string
• DATETIMEVALUE: casts/converts a value into a timestamp
• ARRAYLEFT, ARRAYRIGHT, ARRAYCONCATENATE, ARRAYMERGE: Simplifies the use of arrays and multiselection parameters
• WEEKDAY, YESTERDAY: convenience functions to make working with dates easier
• DRILLDOWN: Create a drill-down URL. Yes, thats the same stuff you could define in the UI.

Bugs, squashed, fried and on a delicious dish

I personally fried a large amount of bugs in this release. Those buggers got on my nerves and that is not healthy at all. Several layouter bugs have hit the grave so that subreports in conjunction with the keep-together feature behave sane now.

So what are you waiting for?

Go and grab your fresh copy of Pentaho Reporting from Sourceforge or a smokin’ fresh build from our Hudson-CI system.

Earlier this day, Doug uploaded the latest bug-fix release of Pentaho Reporting named Pentaho Reporting 3.6.1.

This is a bug-fix release and therefore focuses on bug-fixes and stability improvements. As this release is included in the Pentaho BI-server 3.6.0 release, Kettle/Pentaho Data Integration and Mondrian/Pentaho Analysis have been updated to the latest releases, so be careful when patching older releases of the BI-server.

Pentaho Reporting 3.6.1 resolves many performance and memory consumption issues. All report processing activities should be considerable faster now. We added several performance monitoring and memory tuning settings to log the progress of the report generation and to better tune the reporting engine for large to huge reports within a limited amount of memory. I will cover these settings in a later posting.

Transforming this blog into a Pentaho Reporting Status Portal

I also changed the layout of this web-site slightly to now serve as central hub for Pentaho Reporting status updates. In new status box on the left hand side I now always show the latest releases available along with convenient links to both the Changelog and the SourceForge download pages.

ChangeLog for the Reporting Engine

3.6.1:
        * [BUG] PRD-2709: Subreports that are hidden via "subreport-active"
          must not generate any content in the page and must not trigger
          the creation of a new page. Layouting must be deferred until at
          least some content is produced.

        * [BUG] PRD-2713: Specifying a invalid column in a database driven
          parameter must return  for that column to behave exactly
          like the reporting engine behaves elsewhere.

        * [BUG] PRD-2712: Parsing symbolic color names failed due to a
          case-sensitivity problem.

        * [BUG] PRD-2705: SubReportActive expression was evaluated in the
          context of the parent state instead of using the current state
          and thus the data-context of the subreport.

        * [BUG] PRD-2704: Table-based pageable output never ran through the
          page header when computing cell styles and thus never formated
          cells properly.

        * [BUG] PRD-2698: PreviewParameterDialog and ParameterReportController
          did not report all errors to the user. The PreviewParameterDialog
          only provided constructors for JFrames, and thus blocking any use
          from Dialogs or AWT frames.

        * [BUG] PRD-2697: Limit and Query-Timeout values defined on a report
          had no effect, as the values were removed during the derive() call.

        * [BUG] PRD-2695: Trying to save a report with null-values in a
          array on a expression property failed due to an invalid parser.
        
        * [BUG] PRD-2696: ElementStyleSheet was not serializable anymore.

        * [BUG] PRD-2433: NPE on import of excel files with irregular cell
          structures.

        * [BUG] PRD-2054: ItemHideFunction and other page-event dependent
          functions behaved badly as the page-event processing was invalid
          when processing a report in a pageable report processor.

        * [BUG] PRD-2658: The report.name property is dysfunctional since
          we moved to report-bundles. It must not be shown to the users of
          PRD.

        * [BUG] BISERVER-4180: OLAP4J changed the filter axis to no longer
          provide default members. This changes the layout of the column
          names generated by the OLAP4J denormalized-datafactory. As OLAP4J
          no longer provides the relevant information, we cannot maintain
          backward compatibility.

        * [BUG] PRD-2676: Curly brace parametrization was broken for OLAP4J
          datasources. OLAP4J datasources were not able to read the queries
          that were defined on them when the report was parsed.

        * [BUG] PRD-2680, PRD-2671: OutputFormat attribute on MasterReport
          is now a predefined list of known output formats based on the
          list of available report-process-task implementations.

        * The subreport's name is now shown in the design-view.

3.6.1-RC1: (2010-04-29)
        * [BUG] PRD-2609: We are using the metadata system to handle all the
          lookups of localized-strings now. Metadata has its own, strange
          way of defining fall-back locales.

        * [BUG] PRD-2617, PRD-2623: StyleSheet was buggy after performance fixes.

        * [BUG] PRD-2615: Compatiblity mapping was wrong for v0.7x
          reports.

        * [BUG] PRD-2621: PageSetup dialog failed with missing translations.

        * [BUG] PRD-2584, PRD-2579: Performance and memory improvements

        * [BUG] PRD-2472: Printing with the JDK-1.4 code opened the
          progress dialog before the user could confirm the print settings
          dialog. This locked both modal dialogs.

          The report processors never fired report-finished or report
          started events and thus we never had a clear hook to inject
          our code.

        * [BUG] PRD-2607: Barcode element was not working, as the background
          color was computed as black, the same as the foreground color.

        * [BUG] PRD-2581: Group-Header and Footer labels were not
          initialized correctly and thus displayed something strange.
          Attribute-values can be overriden via the metadata even when styles
          are not overridden. The two flags are independent from each other.

        * [BUG] PRD-2611: Array parsing was wrong and thus broke the
          chart-expression parsing when a array contained a space in
          leading or trailing position.

        * [BUG] PRD-2598: The bundle writer should not write empty strings as
          parameter-attribute values. This confuses the parameter editor and
          the parameters.

        * PRD-2590: Mondrian datasource must provide a hook to inject
          a platform dependent rewriter of connection parameter. This
          is needed to let the platform inject their own roles.

        * PRD-2627: Made the check-auto-close query fired by the SQLDatasource
          configurable via the report-configuration.

        * Changed the ENGINEERINGNOTATION function to support fixed
          precision mode.

        * Upgraded Mondrian to 3.2; and added some compatiblity code to
          Mondrian and OLAP4J datasources, as Mondrian changed its
          UniqueIdentifier strings.

        * [BUG] PRD-2588: We need to treat the form tag as paragraph when
          parsing HTML rich-text.

        * [BUG] PRD-2516: Page-header and page-footer attributes for
          excel-export were broken

        * [BUG] PRD-2564: Near-zero-height elements caused DIV/0 exceptions.

        * [BUG] PRD-2491: A null-value in a list-parameter caused the parameter
          to be rendered incorrectly in the swing-preview.

        * [BUG] PRD-2490, 2557, 2572: PageSetupDialog did not handle landscape
          pageformats correctly.

        * [BUG] PRD-2444: Style-key href-window was not persisted correctly.

        * [BUG] extensions-sampledata referenced a invalid hypersonic database.

        * [BUG] Reading BLOBs was buggy due to a invalid index used.

        * [BUG] HorizontalLineElementFactory did not set the scale property
          for some of the static helper methods.

        * [BUG] PRD-2496: Date-CellEditor did not allow null-values as selected
          date and thus the default value for parameters could not be removed.

        * [BUG] PRD-2453: PRD needs to support relative paths in content
          elements.

        * ReadCLOB can now throw exceptions and thus inform the caller that
          something went horribly wrong.

        * Upgraded Mondrian to 3.1.6, Kettle 4.0

        * Allow multi-selection parameter in Metadata datasources.

        * PRD-2562: Added support for HTML events "onmouseout" and "onmouseenter".

        * Renamed the page and total-page function so that they are known
          as running and total page now.

ChangeLog for the Pentaho Report Designer

3.6.1-GA:
       * [BUG] PRD-2698: Previewing a report with parameters failed
         without a sensible error message if the parameters encountered
         an error. The plain-text preview did not even query for
         parameters and failed instantly when mandatory parameters were
         defined.

       * [BUG] PRD-2714: Using the select-all menu-item or the Menu+A
         shortcut also selected the page-band and thus did not allow to
         move elements around.

       * [BUG] PRD-2680: The list of supported output formats is now a
         list provided by the reporting engine. This reduces the chances
          of having invalid properties defined in this field.

       * [BUG] PRD-2433: Importing XLS files with irregular cell
         structures failed with a NullPointerException.

       * [BUG] PRD-2694: The shift-key as drag-selection enabler behaved
         badly as it was only recognized if the band editor had the focus.

       * [BUG] PRD-2699: The parameter editor dialog did not display the
         defined values for query, column-id or the display-value column
         if the database connection could not be established or if the
         referenced query was not found in one of the connections.

       * [BUG] PRD-2661: Th PreProcessor sample in the report-designer
         must use the correct SampleData connection.

       * [BUG] PRD-2684: In the parameter editor, the default-value should
         accept its input in the same format as given in the parameter
         dataformat text-field.

         If no format is given, the canonical ISO format is used.

       * PRD-2337: The generated MacOS bundle should have a user-friendly
         name. "Pentaho Report Designer" is so much better than
         "report-designer".

       * [BUG] PRD-2660, PRD-2659: Creating Kettle objects by invoking the
         public no-arg constructor generates invalid objects that cause
         errors in Kettle later. We have to manually match our object
         with one that is provided by Kettle's many public arrays, and
         then use the Kettle object (that has been initialized by some
         arcane magic or a spell of a dragon or so).

         This bug caused weird errors in the JDBC and Mondrian datasourc
         editor, which uses Kettle as metadata backend.

       * [BUG] PRD-2587: Need to disable HTML rendering, as this does not
         work in tables. Backported the GenericCellEditor to LibSwing.

3.6.1-RC1: (2010-04-29)
       * [BUG] PRD-2637: A ClassCastException occured after the last
         report has been closed. This was caused by a invalid model/
         tree path given while trying to restore the now invalid
         expand-nodes state.

       * [BUG] PRD-2633: The document-metadata editor must treat empty
         textfields as null values so that we remove empty titles from
         the report.

       * [BUG] PRD-2640: The Welcome pane did not have a keyboard handler
         on the tree and thus never allowed the user to open the reports
         by hitting Enter.

       * [BUG] PRD-2629: The various "Close" operations did not handle
         user-cancel requests properly and continued to close reports
         without permission.

       * [BUG] PRD-2628, PRD-2631: Save and Save As did not properly
         update the resource keys of "definition-source" and "content-base"
         and the assigned resource-manager to the possibly new prpt
         location. Therefore all bundle-internal resource references
         were lost and saving or running a modified report with embedded
         images or embedded resources failed.

       * [BUG] PRD-2633: The wizard needs to clear the document metadata
         when materializing a report from a template.

       * [BUG] PRD-2581: Group-header and -footer labels were not
         initialized correctly and thus grossly misbehaved.

       * [BUG] PRD-2599: The default-value editor in the parameter dialog
         was not updated correctly when selecting a new parameter class
         or when switching between single-selection and multi-selection
         parameter types.

       * [BUG] PRD-2614: Due to invalid internal events fired at the worst
         times we ended up creating resource keys that could not be embedded
         into the PRPT file when the report is saved. Thus saving the report
         failed.

       * [BUG] Cleaned out the Help->System Information dialog so that all
         the entries there are sorted.

       * [BUG] Removed some unnecessary libraries that were brought in via
         IVY.

       * [BUG] PRD-2608: The metadata dialog did misbehave when it was resized
         and did not remember the last location of the XMI files it loaded.

       * [BUG] PRD-2604: A invalid attribute name was used when writing
         wizard-specification documents. Therefore loading the report later
         did not restore the name.

       * [BUG] PRD-2603: Removing extra template groups when generating a
         report from a wizard-template was not working properly.

       * [BUG] PRD-2597: The Display-Title for tabs and window-title-bar in
         the report-designer was computed in a wrong way.

       * [BUG] PRD-2496: A Date-CellEditor did not allow  values and
         thus it was impossible to unset a previously defined default value.

       * [BUG] When the first Group did not define a name, the group-selector
         in the table-editors became impossible to use.

       * [BUG] PRD-2453: When saving a report, we have to update the content
         base property of the report, so that relative paths can be resolved
         in the UI editor.

       * [BUG] PRD-2547: Copy&Paste of banded subreports converted the
         subreports into inline-subreports.

       * [BUG] PRD-2573: Translations in the publish dialog were missing and
         thus showing the error dialog on publish problems failed with a
         MissingTranslationException.

       * [BUG PRD-2520: Moving elements in the editor behaved badly as soon
         as a border was set. The layouter did not take borders into account
         and thus all subsequent operations produced bad results.

       * [API] PreviewParameterDialog in the engine now only accepts
         MasterReport objects, as they are the only ones that can carry
         external parameters.

       * [BUG] PRD-2561: The field selector in the style table was always
         empty, as the report designer context was never set.

       * [BUG] PRD-2540, BISERVER-4129: When publishing a report with
         non-ascii characters in the name, the report name was corrupted on
         the server. The server automatically recodes all HTTP-requests to
         the local system encoding and thus may break the encoding given by
         the report designer.

       * [BUG] PRD-2541: A invalid attribute was written when trying to
         define the group-totals-label.

       * [BUG] The Welcome-Pane showed empty directories as report files
         and subsequently tried to load them when the user double clicked
         on them.

       * [BUG] PRD-2493: Page-Align dialog did nothing after being confirmed
         by the user. This dialog is shown after the page format changed.

       * Pentaho Reporting now uses Kettle 4.0 and Mondrian 3.2 to be
         in sync with the latest BI-Server release.

       * Added a "report-designer.properties" file in the resources directory
         to make it more obvious for users where to put report-designer
         related configuration settings.

       * [BUG] AGILEBI-213, PRD-2460: The report-design-wizard should not show
         the environment variables or parameter fields in the field selector.

       * [BUG] PRD-2467: Templates used with RDW should have data connection
         defined as JNDI Sample Data

       * [BUG] PRD-2453: Resource linking always stored absolute paths
         in the generated resource-key. We need to prefer relative paths
         so that publishing or moving a report along with its images does
         not break the report.

       * [BUG] PRD-2446: Top-N-Analysis.prpt sample report was broken.

Since yesterday, Pentaho Reporting 3.6 is available from Sourceforge. This release brings a large set of new features and a even larger set of bug-fixes.

We spend most time making the native parameter system introduced in Release 3.5 more powerful and user-friendly and while working on it closing a few functionality gaps of that release.

The new functionality includes

• hidden and computed parameter
• runtime security properties for SQL, Mondrian and OLAP4J datasources
• added a more powerful page-setup dialog, as the JDK’s page-setup dialog sucks
• exposed environment variables as automatic fields
• a new data field palette
• open reports via the command line
• created a magical “offline” mode
• Mondrian and OLAP4J datasources now can use the old ${parameter} syntax again to parametrize queries
• Advanced-Mondrian and Advanced-OLAP4J datasource to compute MDX queries at runtime
• new formula functions: PARAMETERTEXT, PARSEDATE, MESSAGE and ISNA

We also fixed a large number of bugs, including nasty beasts like caching and memory issues as well as many smaller ones.

With Pentaho Reporting 3.6 I’m happy to be able to say that this release was to a very large extend driven by the needs and input of our community. Gunter Rombauts provided great input on his real-world needs for supporting custom Mondrian roles. Pedro Alves contributed on the caching issues and the Mondrian parametrization, eventually leading to the re-introduction of the ${parameter} format. Tom Barber along with the IRC channel folks gave great input to make the Report Designer more usable. And not to forget the almost unbelievable amount of testing and validating of the implementation that came from everyone.

Thank you all! OpenSource rocks!

Update: A recording of Kurtis Cruzada’s Community Webcast presenting many of the new features is now available.