Building Pentaho 3.5 with the latest and greatest Reporting Engine

Pentaho 3.5 is out for a while, with the new Citrus reporting engine. Thomas and the rest of the Pentaho crew did a great job turning the mess that was the old Report Designer into a totally rewritten application with lots of new features.


But everyone knows that on the first version of a (re)new software it's inevitable to find problems. This is not an exception. Real world is very different from the labs. Here are some examples of this.


Gotta love open source; We have everything we need to be able to debug the problems. We were able to solve some and Thomas solved the nasty ones within no-time. Many thanks to the crazy German / Irish/ I never know.


Now the worst part - We have a shiny and working PRD but we need to make it work on Pentaho platform. One option is to use all the latest trunk that picks up latest PRD. Well... not really an option. Even I am not crazy enough to do that.


So I opted to keep using 3.5.0 GA but tell in the build process to get only the latest trunk of the reporting enging.


I use CBF for... well, everything. And CBF uses the main pentaho build process. We had to change an ivy file in order for this to work. I hate ivy. Everyone tells me it's a good thing, but from my experience it's only good for them.


Anyway, after some fight, here's the file that we need to replace. It's under bi-platform-assembly/ivy.xml. For cbf you can drop it in patches/target-build/bi-platform-assembly/ivy.xml. You'll also need the latest ivy version (2.1.x). Just drop the jar in the ant lib dir.

Also set this property in your build config file:

dependency.pentaho-reporting.revision=TRUNK-SNAPSHOT

Now you can have fun with the latest and the greatest.