1. OpenERP-Pentaho Integration
Presented
by
Jonathan Wilson
WillowIT Pty Ltd
Australia
OpenERP Silver Partner
&
CTP

2. What is Pentaho?
● Open source business analytics tools for business
integration and business intelligence
● Pentaho Reporting Project includes a report designer
and report server
● Written in Java
● Commercial support
● For this project we were only interested in the
reporting capabilities of Pentaho
● Business analytics and BI make Pentaho an ideal tool
for the delivery of value-added services

3. Implementation - Designer
Pentaho report designer
Data access layer (JDBC etc)
OpenERP object interface
PostgreSQL
OpenERP Custom
Objects method

4. Implementation – Run time
OpenERP
Custom module
XML-RPC interface (java)
Pentaho Report server
Data access layer (JDBC etc)
OpenERP object interface
PostgreSQL Custom
OpenERP
Objects method

5. Report Designer
● Full featured report designer comparable to
Jasper Reports iReports
● Can be used by consultants with little or no
OpenERP development skills
● Reports can be run independently of OpenERP
if required

6. Report Parameters
● Reports can be designed with parameters, e.g. select records
with particular start/end dates, or partner range etc...
● Reports run via the designer with parameters will prompt the
user for the parameter values
● Our custom OpenERP Pentaho module will also prompt the
user for these paramters within OpenERP using designer
defaults
● If no parameters are passed to an object based report then the
selected object ids are passed

7. Security
● Reports using JDBC will have security restrictions of
selected database user
● Reports using object interface will respect user access
rights
● Reports run via a custom method can use their own
rules
● Reports accessed via menus can have group security
assignments

8. Demonstration
● Designer – JDBC, Object and custom method
access
● Installing reports in OpenERP
● Running reports in OpenERP – parameter
prompting and report output type selection
● Caveat: we are still in pre-beta mode!

9. Summary
● We now have a report writer that is feature rich and well
recognised
● Easy to use by professionals and competent end-users
● Output format can be selected at run-time
● Report parameters can be defined at design time and prompted
for at run-time within OpenERP
● Requires no extra module installation to run reports – reports
can be handed off to non-programmers and support consultants
● Excellent tool for value-added services
● Pentaho offers a full suite of professional tools for analytics and
BI (Business Intelligence)

10. Project Stage
● Pre-beta
● Pentaho-OpenERP object data access layer will
be a core part of Pentaho v4.0 due later this year
(Pieter van der Merwe is a Pentaho contributor)
● Currently only string, number and date-time type
fields can be used as filters within OpenERP
● WillowIT will bundle the bits together with doco
after Pentaho V4 is released

11. Acknowledgements
Pentaho – OpenERP data access layer (Java):
Pieter van der Merwe, DeBortoli Wines, Australia
Pentaho XML-RPC layer (Java):
Deepak Seshadri, WillowIT, Australia
OpenERP Pentaho integration module:
Richard deMeester, WillowIT, Australia
NaN.tic Jasper OpenERP integration module
Inspiration:
Me :-((