One of the key features of the analytics is the easy access. For this reason it’s very important to have available an Alfresco dashlet and a menu item in the Alfresco header, where you can find all the links to the dashboards, reports and analytics. Do you want to see how the Alfresco dashlet works? See it in action!
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Probably you already know that next 7th of November, in London, will be the next Pentaho Community Meeting (PCM 2015). This is always a nice meeting, informal and interesting for technical professionals working with this Suite. This is year of the incoming Pentaho 6 version and the very first year under the Hitachi ownership, for the Pentaho guys.
To hear about those nice things, I will be physically there (also to have a weekend in London 
) and I’ll be pleased to show some results of the development with a colleague Alberto Mercati about transparent and trusted authentication between an external application and Pentaho. Take a look here for the complete agenda and all the informations about the event.
From another point of view, if you are curious to understand what we are going to show about Pentaho transparent authentication into your custom applications, take a look at the github project below.
https://github.com/Rospaccio/pentaho-authentication-ext
Last but not least, many thanks to codek1 (alias Dan Keeley) for the support and organization.
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Some months are gone from the latest A.A.A.R. release, but this doesn’t mean that things are not going ahead. 
During the past months I received some concerns about the extraction performance. Today the A.A.A.R. v4.0 is released with a couple of relevant features: the transparent authentication from Alfresco to Pentaho (using the Pentaho Transparent Authentication plugin) and the repository extraction significantly improved in performance.
Regarding the repository extraction, I’m going to publish the results of some tests on a repository with one milion of documents. I’m vary happy about the results and the relevant improvement respect to the previous versions, definitely slower than this one.
Last but not least, are you curious to better understand how the Pentaho Transparent Authentication plugin works? If yes and you are close to London, don’t miss the next Pentaho Community Meeting.
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Starting from the A.A.A.R. v4.0, the new addon for Alfresco Community Edition v5.1 has been released to support the latest community version of Alfresco, today in its third “Early Access” release. As you can see in the compatibility matrix, the compliance is today for A.A.A.R. v4.0 (available for Pentaho 5.4) and A.A.A.R. v4.1 (available soon for Pentaho 6). You can find it downloadable at the link below:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/aaar/files/v4.0/
To understand better how the Community Edition is going ahead, with Early Access and Generally Available releases, I suggest to read this blog post from Richard Esplin (Product Manager for Alfresco Community Edition). Have a good read.
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AAAR 4.1 analytics is released on GitHub and SourceForge with the full support of Pentaho 6.0.0.0-353 and Alfresco until the version 5.1-EA. Take a look to the compatibility matrix for a complete description. In this page you can see the detailed change log and the supported Alfresco versions.
Below a screenshot of the installation wizard describing the Alfresco CE v5.1 support in the installation dashboard.
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Yesterday on twitter, two of the main Pentaho Community members started a conversation about the Pentaho Community Meeting 2016. Below the quote of Dan Keeley with one of his twits.
OK anyone who is up for organising #pcm16 please ping myself, @diethardsteiner or @FrkCorti to get added to the short list for a vote soon.
— Dan Keeley (@codek1) January 12, 2016
Please let me know or write to Dan Keeley (@codek1) and/or Diethard Steiner (@diethardsteiner) to submit your suggestion.
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During the past days, I have received some contacts describing problems during the installation of the A.A.A.R. application from the Pentaho marketplace. After some investigations, the issue seems to be connected to the sourceforge links that have recently changed its format.
To solve the problem, some of you asked me how to manually install A.A.A.R., and I have added a more generic tutorial on how to manually install a Sparkl application. The tutorial has been added to the collection of the Spark tutorials. I hope that you find it useful.
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Bye bye CMIS!
With the latest A.A.A.R. v4.2 release, the extraction jobs have been fully moved to Alfresco REST based calls, instead of using CMIS (great in principle, but slower for massive enquiries).
Another added feature is the management of the custom properties extraction, as showed as a brief presentation in the video below.
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After a stress test on a 2 milion documents repository, more than 6 milions of instances of custom types and aspects and 180.000 instances of workflows (everything on the same Alfresco instance). Together with two others different sources (a real Enterprise Record Management System and a ERP repository) the A.A.A.R. v4.3 has been released. This version has been tested on the brand new Pentaho 6.1 release, that comes with some relevant improvements on performance over JSON treatment and various other nice changes.
This release is dedicated to the incoming BeeCon event (to thank all of BeeGirls/BeeGuys for the support) and the Pentaho girls and guys for the sponsorship of the event.
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Do you want to know how to manually install A.A.A.R.?
Are you using the A.A.A.R. analytics over Alfresco and want to understand its scalability?
Do you want start to understand how to Dockerize A.A.A.R.?
Take a look at the A.A.A.R. Manual Installation guide written by Vincenzo Sorrentino and tested in a Docker architecture. This is another great example of contribution from the Community.
Thank you Vincenzo!
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“Eating our own dogfood and putting our trust in your Alfresco Community instance” has been the vision proposed at the BeeCon’16 by two known guys from the Order Of The Bee: marsband (aka Martin Cosgrave) and Digital Catalyst (aka Daren Firminger). The vision became real at the BeeCon’16 in two ways, at least:
Talking about the buzzdoc (the BeeCon’16 Alfresco instance for speakers and organisers) Digital Catalyst shares some interesting descriptions and numbers, using AAAR. To view the KPIs and to know further details, you can refer directly to the full article from Daren, at the link below.
Order of the Bee Beecon 2016 Dog Fooding Alfresco by Digital Catalyst
Last but not least, don’t miss to follow them. They are working for interesting projects for the community all (puppet-alfresco and docker-alfresco).
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During the support activities on the A.A.A.R. solution, one of the most common request is about the success (or failure) of the extraction task from Alfresco. As a standard Business Intelligence solution, the extraction task is developed as a batch (called ETL process), in average executed during the night time.
How can you be sure that the extraction from Alfresco succeed or failed?
And how can you be sure that all the audit trail, the documents, the folders and workflow instances are correctly available into the analytic environment?
For those purpose, the brand new A.A.A.R. v4.4 release has been developed, together with some minor improvements you can fin detailed here in the change log.
In this v4.4 release the relevant features are mainly two:
Both the features are a helpful support to the Administrator, to control IF the scheduled extractions succeed and IF all the Alfresco’s data are correctly available into the A.A.A.R. Data Mart. All of this, without technical tasks, in a easy and automatic dashboard.
The Extractions log is developed as a dashboard, available directly in the A.A.A.R. Wizard. In the dashboard you can filter: the Alfresco instance, the period of the extractions and, as the last selection, a single extraction. Once the extraction is selected, you can view two different panels: the first describing the logs of the various tasks composing the data extraction and the second describing a Data Quality evaluation. In the extraction log panel, is presented:
Below a video describing how to use the dashboard.
As you can see from the video, below the extraction log panel another panel describes the details of the entities extracted and available into the A.A.A.R. Data Marts. For each entity, it’s presented a number representing:
If the total number of entities counted into Alfresco are equal to the total number of entities counted into the A.A.A.R. DataMart, we can be reasonably sure that all the data are migrated and available in the target repository (A.A.A.R.). To make easier this check, a green OK tag describes the success of the check and a red KO tag describes that something should be checked.
Below a simple example describing how the panel is showed in case of failure of Data Quality checks.
Last but not least, which are the available entities included into the Data Quality panel? Below a complete list for a better understanding.
cm:content type (and all the defined subtypes).cm:content subtypes, requested to be extracted as custom types (you can read here for further details) .cm:folder type (and all the defined subtypes).cm:folder subtypes, requested to be extracted as custom types (you can read here for further details) .Concluding, the new A.A.A.R. v4.4 release is more stable than ever. Not only because is used to analyze big Alfresco repositories but also because helps the Administrator to have a trusted analytic repository for the Knowledge Workers (the final users). Enjoy and give me feedback… please. 
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Few weeks ago, close to the annual Pentaho Community Meeting, the Pentaho Team released the brand new Pentaho Suite v7 with a complete restyle of the layout (of course, this is only one of the improvements). This a good opportunity for me to update the step by step tutorial on how to install the Pentaho Data Integration (aka Kettle) after the one about the past version 5.
This tutorial is based on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Operating System. Nothing really changes if you use a different Operating System (Windows platforms included) because the installation task is very straightforward.
In this tutorial is used a vanilla installation of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The only recommendation is to execute the command below to be sure your environment is correctly updated.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgradeNow that the Operating System is correctly updated, let’s install (or check) the correct installation of Java 8. I usually prefer the Oracle Java release, since a lot of time very easy to install in a Ubuntu Operating System.
To install Oracle Java 8 into your environment you can open a terminal and execute the commands below.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default
After the installation finishes, you can run the following command to check if everything is working correctly:
java -version
The result should looks like the following content.
java version "1.8.0_111"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_111-b14)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.111-b14, mixed mode)
Before moving to the PDI 7 installation, Let’s check that the JAVA_HOME variable is corretly available into the environment. Using a terminal, let’s execute the command below.
env | grep JAVA_HOME
If you get an empty result, execute nano ~/.bashrc and then append the command below to file content.
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle
Save it and exit (CTRL+X and Y). Please remember to execute the command below to reload the environment into the current bash shell.
source .bashrcAfter Java8 is available into your environment, please proceed to download the Pentaho Data Integration 7 (aka Kettle) package from the official website or the sourceforge web page. In our case we are going to install the Pentaho Data Integration 7 Community Edition.
Once the pdi-ce-7.0.0.0.25.zip file will be downloaded in the system, unzip it into the desktop or everywhere else you will like (usually the /opt path is suggested) . All the PDI 7 tool will be available in the folder described below:
data-integration
Before launching PDI 7 the very first time, it’s suggested to install the package below executing the command into a terminal.
sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0
Probably you cannot believe me but this is enough to install PDI 7 into your system.
PDI 7 tool is composed by different executables and services (Spoon, Kitchen, Pan), everyone designed for a specific purpose. To create all the default configuration folders and files, you have to run the Spoon tool for the first time. Spoon is a graphical user interface that allows you to design transformations and jobs that can be run with the other Kettle tools (Pan and Kitchen). To run the spoon tool, follow the instructions described here.
After the first run, you are ready to use Pentaho Data Integration… enjoy your next ETL.
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Few weeks ago, close to the annual Pentaho Community Meeting, the Pentaho Team released the brand new Pentaho Suite v7 with a complete restyle of the layout (of course, this is only one of the improvements). This a good opportunity for me to update the step by step tutorial on how to install the Pentaho Business Analytics after the one about the past version 5.
This tutorial describes the default installation using the HSQL database for the security storage. If you want to know how to install it using MySql database instead, I suggest to check into the Official resources or in several articles around the web.
This tutorial is based on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Operating System. Nothing really changes if you use a different Operating System (Windows platforms included) because the installation task is very straightforward.
In this tutorial is used a vanilla installation of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The only recommendation is to execute the command below to be sure your environment is correctly updated.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgradeNow that the Operating System is correctly updated, let’s install (or check) the correct installation of Java 8. I usually prefer the Oracle Java release, since a lot of time very easy to install in a Ubuntu Operating System.
To check if you already have it, simply execute the command below from a terminal.
java -version
If you don’t have it already installed, please read here to understand how to install it.
After Java8 is available into your environment, please proceed to download the Pentaho Business Analytics 7 package from the official website or the sourceforge web page. In our case we are going to install the PentahoBusiness Analytics 7 Community Edition.
Once the pentaho-server-ce-7.0.0.0-25.zip file will be downloaded in the system, unzip it into the desktop or everywhere else you will like (usually the /opt path is suggested) . All the Pentaho BA 7 tool will be available in the folder described below:
pentaho-server
Probably you cannot believe it, but this is enough to install Pentaho Business Analytics 7 into your system.
Pentaho Business Analytics 7 is mainly a web application deployed in a tomcat servlet container. You can easily run the Pentaho Business Analytics 7, opening a terminal and executing the start-pentaho script stored in the pentaho-server folder (the one with the sh extension for the Linux based operating systems and the one with the bat extension for the Windows based operating systems).
To check what is happening to the web application, you can see at the log in the file described below.
<pentaho-server>/tomcat/logs/catalina.out
Once, the application is started, you can access to the user interface using a web browser at the link below.
http://<server>:8080/pentaho
With the Community Edition is suggested to use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome instead of MS IE Explorer (not well supported today).
To access as administrator you can use the admin user with password password.
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At the past Beecon 2017, the new release (5.0) of the integration between Alfresco and Pentaho has been announced. Together with a rebranding from the previous project named A.A.A.R.
Today Alflytics is completed and released as Early Access version. The enhancements are numerous. Below the main ones:
Now it’s your turn to use it (check the full manual here), but I would like to invite you to join the Early Access Program to test it in your environment and make it more stable and ready for the GA release.
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As a result of some feedback from the Community, an issue related to Alflytics has been solved. The issue affected the installation on different URLs from the default one: http://localhost:8080.
In this case, another side effect happened during the extraction, with a result of a failure task with a unclear message SyntaxError: Empty JSON string (script#5).
To solve the issue and the side effect, an updated release has been published including a description of the error as FAQ in the documentation.
Below a detailed description of the error happening during the extraction task. More in detail, during if you experience an error similar to the following, this post can help you to understand (and solve).
2017/08/20 20:00:24 - getQueries.0 - Finished processing (I=0, O=0, R=1, W=1, U=0, E=0) org.pentaho.di.core.exception.KettleValueException: Javascript error: SyntaxError: Empty JSON string (script#5) at org.pentaho.di.trans.steps.scriptvalues_mod.ScriptValuesMod.addValues(ScriptValuesMod.java:475) at org.pentaho.di.trans.steps.scriptvalues_mod.ScriptValuesMod.processRow(ScriptValuesMod.java:541) at org.pentaho.di.trans.step.RunThread.run(RunThread.java:62) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748) Caused by: org.mozilla.javascript.EcmaError: SyntaxError: Empty JSON string (script#5) at org.mozilla.javascript.ScriptRuntime.constructError(ScriptRuntime.java:3785) at org.mozilla.javascript.ScriptRuntime.constructError(ScriptRuntime.java:3763) at org.mozilla.javascript.NativeJSON.parse(NativeJSON.java:146) at org.mozilla.javascript.NativeJSON.execIdCall(NativeJSON.java:122) at org.mozilla.javascript.IdFunctionObject.call(IdFunctionObject.java:129) at org.mozilla.javascript.optimizer.OptRuntime.call1(OptRuntime.java:66) at org.mozilla.javascript.gen.script_3._c_script_0(script:5) at org.mozilla.javascript.gen.script_3.call(script) at org.mozilla.javascript.ContextFactory.doTopCall(ContextFactory.java:426) at org.mozilla.javascript.ScriptRuntime.doTopCall(ScriptRuntime.java:3178) at org.mozilla.javascript.gen.script_3.call(script) at org.mozilla.javascript.gen.script_3.exec(script) at org.pentaho.di.trans.steps.scriptvalues_mod.ScriptValuesMod.addValues(ScriptValuesMod.java:388) ... 3 more ... 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Get queries - ERROR (version 7.1.0.0-12, build 1 from 2017-05-16 17.18.02 by buildguy) : Errors detected! 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Get queries - Transformation detected one or more steps with errors. 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Get queries - Transformation is killing the other steps! 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Get queries - ERROR (version 7.1.0.0-12, build 1 from 2017-05-16 17.18.02 by buildguy) : Errors detected! 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Get all - Starting entry [Write To Log 2] 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Query retrieve failure. - Cannot retrieve queries using the Pentaho REST services on 'http://localhost:8080'. 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Query retrieve failure. - Please check the correct URL before requesting support. 2017/08/20 20:00:24 - Query retrieve failure. - If the URL (port included) is wrong, update the ETLs using the Spoon User Interface.
In case you get this error, the Get queries transformation cannot retrieve the query to be executed. Get queries transformation retrieves the query using a Pentaho REST service. By default the installation assumes that Pentaho is available at http://localhost:8080. if you will use a different port (or URL), you have to update the default parameters of the ETLs using Spoon. Then you can launch the extraction again.
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Together with the recent book named “Pentaho 8 Reporting for Java Developers” (Packt Publishing) a public repository on Github has been developed with more than 40 examples with PRPT files, Maven Projects, one CDE Dashboard and a PDI Transformation. All the examples offer a complete set of demos for the 8th version of Pentaho Reporting.
After the release, the Nexus Repository containing the Pentaho artifacts has been renamed differently. In addition, the folder structure of the groups/artifacts changed. Those changes broke the Maven Projects and I received some feedback from the developers that the Java projects did not work.
In the past week end I had the time to update the projects to fix the issues. The changes has been on the pom.xml files, more in particular on:
<repository> <id>pentaho-public</id> <url>http://nexus.pentaho.org/content/groups/omni/</url> </repository>
groupId of the Pentaho dependencies for the engine changed to org.pentaho.reporting.engine. Few changes were required on the artifactId tags too.groupId of the Pentaho dependencies for the libraries changed to org.pentaho.reporting.library.As you can see, the changes are not related to the repository only, but it has been a requested update to make the projects working again and being an examples for the developers all.
Please continue to share feedback and enjoy the development. Cheers.
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During my investigations and experimentations, I was not able to find any working solution using Pentaho dashboards into a generic Angular application. The only project I found was a POC in Angular 1, not valid anymore, considering that Angular is today at its fifth version with major changes in the language and framework.
Angular is definitely one of the most appealing front-end technologies in the market and it is widely used by a lot of developers all over the world. To understand if Pentaho dashboards could be easily rendered in this framework, I started to play with both.
After some investigations and successful experimentations, things became more clear and I had the idea to develop a reusable package for the developers benefit. The result is the pentaho-dashboard-project hosted on GitHub.
The pentaho-dashboard-project contains a collection of Angular components and services to render the Pentaho dashboards, released as a npm package published into the public repository. The npm package is named pentaho-dashboard and can be used starting from here.
But things didn’t stop here. Another thing I enjoyed to experiment has been writing something into GitBook. GitBook is a modern and simple solution to documentation, digital writing and publishing. In this case, a full description of the composition of the package and some practical tutorials describe how to use the integration into an existing Angular application.
Do you want to see in practice what you can do? Take a look at the screenshot below.
Enjoy the pentaho-dashboard-project.
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This year the global Pentaho Community Meeting (aka PCM18) will happen in Italy, more precisely in Bologna. It will happen the 23rd, 24th and 25th of November and I’m particularly happy, because I’ll be involved together with some friends of the PUG Italia.
Below some more info, if you will decide to join us (and I sincerely hope so).
Ciao Pentaho Community Meeting 2018! (in italian)
Pentaho Community Meeting 2018 (by IT-Novum)
10 Years Pentaho Community Meeting (by IT-Novum)
Stay tuned for more information.
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