CROSSTABS in Pentaho Report Designer (EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE)
Crosstabs are easy and relatively easy way to visualize tabular data along two or more axis. Crosstabs are still experimental feature, and as such are not up to mark in BI reports. Although they are already used to create some really useful reports, they still have parts which are to be handled in query as it expects the normalized data.
1. Data has to be sorted to match the group structure.
2. NULL data must not be present.
3. Aggregations in cross tabs are not flexible.
1. Data has to be sorted :
Data has to be sorted in the query of the crosstab in the order followed Group, Rows, Columns. If they are not sorted it pops up an error saying data is unsorted and the reports are not generated.
2.NULL data must not be present:
No NULL values are allowed in the data. The consequent group data is moved to the present group which displays the wrong report with inappropriate data. So, one has to handle the NULL by replacing them with 0.
3. Aggregations in cross tabs are not flexible:
Aggregations as in the print function where we could either display max or min or sum etc.. wouldnt calculate the % and the functions has to be used in case of any special calculations. It cannot be handled in attributes with regular expressions.
Thanks
Asha Bidiyasar
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