So once again I find myself writing a upgrade guide for the ancient BI-Server releases. It may be futile to say so, but: Hey, this is the last time I am back-porting anything for these dusty creaky collections of bits and bytes.
The next release of Pentaho Reporting will be the 4.0 release, with APIs changing, worlds ending and other mind-altering influences happening. And I surely don’t have the patience to wait until the zombies crumble to dust. So be warned, your clock is ticking too.
Enough of the happy talk, lets talk upgrade.
As a result of the upgrade you will:
- have the latest Pentaho Reporting Engine running.
- be able to use the Report Designer 3.7
- have it a lot easier to design reports with Index- and Table-Of-Contents sections
- have DrillLinking working for PRPT files
- make use of the upgraded Report-Viewer and its improved parameter-handling
- have the powers to design better charts with Image-Maps
- get to your data faster with the new formula functions
- enjoy sending reports in the Excel-2007 format.
There are a few limitations and warnings that come with this upgrade:
- The Drill-Linking-UI will not auto-populate the parameter information for XActions or XAnalyzer content.
- The report-viewer will be upgraded. If you are using invalid report parameter or if you are using report-parameter values that are not acceptable with the parameter-definitions defined in your report, those reports will now always fail. Fix the report definition and the error will go away.
- Any modification made to the report-viewer’s plugin.xml file will be lost.
- There is no and will be no upgrade for BI-Server 3.5.0 or earlier versions. Upgrade!
- The Pentaho-Support-Crew may or may not support such upgraded installations.
For the upgrade you will need:
- A computer with a Java-5 SDK and Apache ANT installed
- A Subversion client and knowledge how to check out code from a repository
- A Pentaho installation on your local disk (and permission to change files there)
This upgrade is relatively easy, and surely easier than the last one. So lets get started.
Step 0: Backup your Pentaho installatio
Don’t skip that part. The upgrade will delete the old reporting files and will install new ones. Always make sure that you can return to the pre-upgrade state.
Step 1: Create a directory for the source-code and the build files.
mkdir /home/user/pentaho
Step 2: Check out the source code of the reporting plugin that matches your BI-Server installation.
In this manual, I will use a command line client. However, any Subversion client will do the job.
BI-Server 3.5.2:
cd /home/user/pentaho svn co http://source.pentaho.org/svnroot/platform-plugins/reporting-plugin/branches/3.7-backport-3.5.2/ reporting-plugin
BI-Server 3.6.0:
cd /home/user/pentaho svn co http://source.pentaho.org/svnroot/platform-plugins/reporting-plugin/branches/3.7-backport-3.6.0/ reporting-plugin
Step 3: Edit the build.properties file to point to your BI-Server installation
There are two possible scenarios, depending on how you installed your Pentaho BI-Server:
(1) BI-server pre-configured installation
This is the standard installation type when you install the Pentaho-BI-Server with an EE-installer or from a ZIP or Tgz file from Sourceforge. You only need to modify a single setting:
install.target-dir=
Example:
install.target-dir=/opt/pentaho-bi-server
(2) A custom installation in a J2EE Web-application server.
The installation process has to delete some old files and copies a couple of new files into the web-application. You have to make sure that the WAR-file is extracted somewhere for the upgrade. WAR files are ZIP files so any unzip tool will do the job.
You will have to set two settings in the build.properties file. Note that there is no entry for “install.lib-dir” in that file. You have to create one on a new line.
install.target-dir=install.lib-dir=
Example:
For this example I will assume that your pentaho-solutions directory is “/srv/pentaho/pentaho-solutions”. I further assume your unzipped WAR file sits in “/home/user/pentaho-war” so that you can see a directory called “/home/user/pentaho-war/WEB-INF/lib”.
install.target-dir=/srv/pentaho install.lib-dir=/home/user/pentaho-war/WEB-INF/lib
Step 4: Download the libs and build the jars
Assuming you have Apache Ant installed, you can run
ant resolve dist
Otherwise, shame on you for skipping the requirements and then read: http://ant.apache.org/manual/install.html
Step 5: Ensure you have made your backup.
Step 6: If you patch a Pre-Configured Installation or an other J2EE server’s work-directory then stop your BI-Server now.
Step 7: Install the artifacts
The ant-script contains all information to patch your WAR file or your Pentaho-PreConfigured Installation. Simply run:
ant install
An ‘ant resolve’ command is missing from Step 4 to download the libs.
Hi Thomas,
will this work with PRD 3.8 on a 3.6 EE server as well?
best, Jos
Almost. There are probably one or two changes in the code needed, but otherwise not much has changed. 3.8 was more a bug-fix release than anything else.
But you probably have to make sure that you update the EHCache configuration of the server as well and that you add a few new declaration to the spring-xml file to make the server side engine use the new data-cache. Without it, the cache will go mad as it is not aware of being in a multi-user environment and you will be in trouble.
Copying the 3.8 version of the EHCache file to the old server should be fine. And with a DIFF between the 3.8 and 3.7 version finding the few reporting entries should be easy too.
wow, that was fast, thanks!