In this chapter, we will demonstrate how to create nicely formatted documents from the data you gathered, with KNIME's report designer. To achieve this, we introduce some new concepts specific to the reporting extension, and show how to use the report designer to create templates and reports. In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- Reporting concepts
- Importing data
- Using the designer
- Generate the report document
- KNIME integration-specific topics
The standard KNIME desktop distribution does not contain reporting capabilities, but KNIME Report Designer and KNIME HTML/PDF Writer extensions are available from the standard KNIME update site to generate reports. The latter is optional and not covered in this book.
We will cover the report designer in detail. KNIME uses Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) to design and generate reports. Eclipse BIRT has a large community, providing a lot of products and tools. You can check it on the eclipse marketplace at http://marketplace.eclipse.org/category/categories/birt. The Eclipse version for KNIME 2.8.x is 3.7.2, so you might want to filter accordingly. The marketplace client for Eclipse 3.7 is available from the main eclipse update site at http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo/ with updates at http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.7. This way you can be sure you will install only compatible extensions, although there is always a chance that the feature you install will not be available readily.
These extensions include additional report items (bar codes, charts, and so on), functions, data sources, but also new export formats (RTF, DOCX, XLSX, and so on). You can also create your own if you need your functionality to be unique.