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.
I went looking for the release under the Source Forge “Pentaho – Business Intelligence” pages, but it still has 3.5.0-stable. It looks like prd-ce-3.6.0-stable.tar.gz is under a separate Source Forge project called “Pentaho Reporting”
Is this significant? Is there a difference between the PRDs in each project?
No, it is not significant. Pentaho Reporting is the sourceforge project for the reporting engine and the report-designer. The same report-designer should also appear on the “pentaho” project (as some users search for it there).
We have used the report designer in 3.5 extensively and 3.6 we have just started using.
I must say I am very impressed with how much you have accomplished. We are migrating many of our Crystal Reports over to Pentaho and have found very few “gaps” in functionality from Crystal XI to Pentaho. I looked at Pentaho when it had the classic engine and it was too intimidating to use. With the New engine, myself and one other analyst we have here have had much success.
Anyway, I just wanted to say great job! We are happy and looking forward to each release.
Hi,
a new feature in pentaho reporting 3.6 schould be to be able to “open reports via the command line”. Could you tell me how that works?
This was not a feature we implemented. So far you still have to write your own code.