Pentaho BI Server - Charting live data

Question

I have a URL that produces JSON,

{
"status": "success",
"totalRecords": 55,
"records": [
    {
        "timestamp": 1393418044341,
        "load": 40,
        "deviceId": 285
    },
    {
        "timestamp": 1393418104337,
        "load": 42,
        "deviceId": 285
    },
    {
        "timestamp": 1393418164328,
        "load": 24.5,
        "deviceId": 285
    },
    {
        "timestamp": 1393418224322,
        "load": 42.5,
        "deviceId": 285
    },

It goes on and on, producing data every 30 seconds or so. I have used Pentaho data-integration to parse and extract each of the data and put them into individual groups - timestamp, load and deviceId. When I saved this it produced a .ktr file.

From this i have used the report-designer to upload the .ktr file and make charts with the data and then I uploaded the charts to the BI Server.

BUT

Can I just take the data, feed it into the BI Server and produce charts, bypassing the report-designer?

Answer 1

Yes you can do this - and using report designer would definately be the wrong way.

However you've inadvertantly made the right choice in building the first bit in PDI! Thats a good move.

Next step is to install CTools, add your .ktr to a CDA datasource (within CDE) and then using CDE define your charts and finally a refresh interval on the dashboard.

There's lots of good CTools tutorials around if you havent used it yet - it is also easily installed from the marketplace, or via ctools-installer.sh