With weeks and weeks of doing nothing bug bug-fixes passing by, we finally reached the point where there is a new release of the reporting tools and the BI-Server comes along. So let’s have a look on what changed and why you want to upgrade as fast as possible.

The most exciting new addition for everyone probably is the Pentaho Interactive Reporting service. Pentaho Interactive Reporting replaces the old Web-Based Ad-Hoc Query and Reporting (WAQR) tool. WAQR was one of those things that get the job done, but do so neither gracefully nor with style. But in the 21st century you need something better. There are times where you can’t go for the full featured hardcore-nerdy Report-Designer option.

Pentaho Interactive Reporting is aimed to supplement our reporting solutions. Technologically it stands between Analyzer being a complete Ad-Hoc tool for exploring the OLAP models of the data-warehouses and the Pentaho report designer, a tool for creating standardized reports for printing or non-interactive access to the data.

Apart from opening up some APIs for Pentaho Interactive Reporting, this release only contains bug-fixes. This release contains fixes in the layouter, the parameter handling and the cascading prompt capabilities inside the platform and the report-designer and fixes some missing functionality inside the charting system.

Overall, 63 bugs got squashed in the process.

Pentaho Reporting 3.8.1 is now in the final build process and from my part the work is done now (assuming that the final tests do not come up with any show-stopping bugs). Judging from the last releases, the final build should be uploaded to our public Sourceforge page in a next weeks.

Release Notes – Pentaho Reporting and Pentaho Report Designer – Version 3.8.1 GA (4.0.0 GA Suite Release)

Bug

• [PRD-114] – Round settings on rectangle element are not being saved.(In HTML)
• [PRD-2434] – PRD will show only the one column if the same column is being queried in multiples of different aggregates.
• [PRD-2690] – Selecting a formula-function in the side-bar-list does not show the function’s description in the bottom area of the formula editor.
• [PRD-2834] – Radar chart not displaying Japanese characters for the legend and graph points
• [PRD-2924] – Reporting plugin within PUC, date field doesn’t populate with the date chosen with the date picker.
• [PRD-3243] – On functions attributes, when you use the … button to select a group, for the property “Reset on Group name , and select a group, the value won’t update to the property
• [PRD-3330] – Removed “ProductLine” custom parameter in Hyperlink definition on the “Product Line Sales.prpt”.
• [PRD-3354] – Experimental features disabled with CDA datasource on classpath dies with NPE
• [PRD-3420] – Date format on X-axis in chart is ignored
• [PRD-3425] – Saving a report with landscape orientation mixes up the left and right margin on load
• [PRD-3431] – Regression: Sheetname style expression used on group header does not set the first sheet’s sheetname
• [PRD-3433] – PRD Windows *.bat startup file does not work with latest JRE
• [PRD-3438] – Horizontal scroll bars do not appear in IE when using custom landscape layout and parameter-layout equal to horizontal
• [PRD-3453] – Tables need a style definition “table-layout: fixed” to render properly in IE
• [PRD-3466] – UI Refresh – Reports in the PUC report viewer do not have new scroll bars.
• [PRD-3467] – UI Refresh – Report filters controls do not have updated style
• [PRD-3470] – Indexed columns had no proper metadata processing and therefore wizard-label printing broke if the tablemodel did not provide proper metadata
• [PRD-3474] – Overlapping element in group header on HTML Action report.
• [PRD-3475] – Report Name for Chart Post Processor is Line it should be “Chart Post Processor”.
• [PRD-3476] – Radar Chart is display incorrect data for the series. The chart is setup incorrectly.
• [PRD-3478] – Firefox: Links are not aligning with items in a PRPT’s pie chart (Product Line Sales)
• [PRD-3479] – Adding element in details band breaks out the Pentaho Report Designer GUI.
• [PRD-3480] – On functions attributes, the Value’s dropdown list contains empty descriptions
• [PRD-3487] – I get the following stack trace when using the report wizard in PRD, no end user impact
• [PRD-3489] – Report Header displays a blue border and the font it not anti-aliased (IE only)
• [PRD-3490] – Reports are not displayed correctly in IE 7.0 and 8.0 when the Report Parameter pane is minimised
• [PRD-3494] – XYBar-Charts do not have the stackedBarRenderPercentages option the categorical charts have.
• [PRD-3495] – Morphing a label into a date field kills the attribute-table when it tries to format the “value” attribute
• [PRD-3496] – Edit-Groups dialog looses user-input if a cell-editor is still active when the user hits OK
• [PRD-3497] – LegacyChartEditor looses user data if closed while editing cells.
• [PRD-3498] – Report Pre-Processors are displayed with their raw classnames in the master-report attribute table
• [PRD-3499] – As a PIR developer, I want the wizard-core to provide an option to override metadata formatting when applying a user defined format.
• [PRD-3503] – Chart Editor has additional chart properties that don’t have user-friendly names.
• [PRD-3507] – Set Italian number format for chart labels
• [PRD-3512] – Problem launching Report Designer version 3.7 and 3.8 on Windows 7
• [PRD-3514] – Adding TOC to report causes exception from JDBC driver
• [PRD-3515] – Url-formula option in the Scatter Plot Chart doesn’t work.
• [PRD-3516] – Saving a report in PUC via IE gives the filename as “reporting” instead of giving the prpt’s name as filename.
• [PRD-3519] – Default date format for a text input parameter field works in 3.6 but not in 3.8
• [PRD-3521] – XY/XYZ charts have no option to display the textual series key in a tooltip or URL
• [PRD-3522] – Layout Issues: Inventory Report doesn’t look the same in 3.8.1.
• [PRD-3528] – Sample Report – What’s New – is not correctly grouping the detail items.
• [PRD-3529] – Block layout in Report Header behaves differently between html stream and html paginated.
• [PRD-3536] – BarcodeElement with invalid barcode input bombs the layout and the report processing
• [PRD-3537] – After changing the orientation from portrait to landscape, the right and left margins get reversed.
• [PRD-3540] – Cascading prompts with server side calculated default values are not working
• [PRD-3541] – A plain text-field parameter with a data-source attached to it resets unknown values to even if the parameter is not strictly validating.
• [PRD-3542] – Editing a metadata query containing the same columns with differ aggregation types, the query aggregation types default to MIN.
• [PRD-3549] – Character spacing on report elements not working on PDF outputs.
• [PRD-2422] – When editing query with a parameter that is a date in the MQL Editor, the editor updates the a parameter, {date_parameter} to DATEVALUE([date_parameter]) and the default value can’t be set.
• [PRD-3349] – Request for patch to Report Designer 3.7 to fix number truncation problem
• [PRD-3365] – Column-by-index fields are not available if the data comes from the query-cache
• [PRD-3373] – Random incorrect value displayed in PDF output format
• [PRD-3375] – Round up/down error in Report Designer
• [PRD-3396] – Problem displaying different format-string in the same column on a number field
• [PRD-3422] – Moving the focus widget out of the parameter panel
• [PRD-3448] – Excel chart output is blurred
• [PRD-3451] – As a reporting user I want to use a default-value formula to get default values for cascading parameters when the parent parameter changes
• [PRD-3454] – On Open dialog, update Report Definition to include the .prpti file type.
• [PRD-3455] – On Open from Repository dialog, update Report Definition to include the .prpti file type.
• [PRD-3465] – Kettle datasource does not work correctly with datasource-cache enabled as it does not take the query name into account
• [PRD-3473] – Label Text “Group n Footer” is displaying in a report generate by the Report Wizard using the new templates.
• [PRD-3411] – Issue with Cascading Prompts

Improvement

• [PRD-3426] – Need the ability to set the padding on the detail elements on templates
• [PRD-3432] – Width of Inherit column is too wide leaving less space for property name
• [PRD-3525] – Update default Chart Options to be consistent with Analyzer and Dashboards
• [PRD-3547] – Opent Dashboards (.xdash) via hyperlinks into new tab
• [PRD-3452] – As a reporting user I want to open PRPTI files from within PRD
• [PRD-3469] – Add new templates and remove the old ones.