This article demonstrates the integration and installation of Pentaho BI CTOOLS like CDF,CDA,CDE,Saiku Analytics etc using installer using Cygwin(UNIX) environment for Windows.
Pentaho is the open source business intelligence development platform which has different components integrated with it. You have both open source and commercial version available to support your BI need. This article is scoped to help open source business intelligence developer to integrate CTOOLS on CDF to fulfill their dashboard development BI needs.
This article is my continued exploration on Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) CDF tools.Please review my article posted here for the background information.
http://codeissue.com/articles/a04e30b116be00f/integration-of-pentaho-bi-community-dashboard-editor-cde-with-community
In this article I have explained the long process on how to get CDE up and running with CDF. But when I accidently stepped in this blog I thought I will give it a try.
http://pedroalves-bi.blogspot.com/2011/06/ctools-installer-making-things-fast.html
So as per this blog it said I can automate my manual steps that I did in first article with the script and was able to do it without any problems in Unix but faced some difficulties in Windows environment. So just wanted to share my finding and steps with you so that it might be useful in your research and development like myself.
So if you follow the steps in my first article then you see pentaho up and running like this.
Figure I: Default Pentaho BI CDF that you will get after download
Please ignore the remaining steps on integrating CDEon CDF .In this article I will demonstrate how you can use installer to integrate all the CTOOLS like CDE CDA CDF and Saiku Analytics with dashboard samples as one task.So let’s get started.
First step is to download Cygwin an UNIX environment for Windows.You can download and learn more about this tool from link below and it has good manual too which is hard to find with the most open source software.
http://www.cygwin.com/
The thing I was overlooking in Pedro blog was that to get two additional package viz. wget from Web package and unzip from Archive package which are not installed by default. Please review the screen shot below for more information which will be better than my explanation in whole paragraph.
Fig II: Shows how you can select wget utility from Web Package in Cygwin
Fig III: Shows how you can select unzip utility from Archive Package in Cygwin
After this steps you Cygwin in ready to install CTOOLS for Pentaho BI.You can lunch the script as shows below:
Fig IV: Shows how you can run script from Cygwin command line like SSH in UNIX
I am just duplicating the steps to show you what kind of error you can get. If you can read the screen then you will see that it’s asking from pentaho solutions directory as next parameter. See the next screen shot closely.
Fig V: Shows how you can run script correctly
The script will download the files using wget and unzip it using unzip commands with the packages that we added in Cygwin.This process will be automated in UNIX and Linux environement and you don’t need to do this steps for Cygwin.
Next it will if its ok to delete some directories.If you have any data back it up if its new project then you can just reply yes to all. Thes it shows done as follow in the screen shot.
Fig VI: Intermediate steps in the installer steps and finally done step.
This is the screen shot that shows new Pentaho BI with added new features.Enjoy your exploration and tuned into codeissue.com for my next posts on how to connect to database and create a sample dashboard.
Fig VII: Pentaho BI in its new glory with CTOOLS
This article demonstrates how you can integrate Pentaho BI CTOOLS with Pentaho CDF.Keep checking codeissue.com for my next article where I will demonstrate you how to configure DataSource and creation of demo dashboard. Please free to send me your comments, suggestions and questions through this website.
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