Prerequisites

This project focuses the attention on the rendering of the Pentaho CTools dashboards. For this reason the only prerequisite needed is the availability of a Pentaho Business Analytics Platform with the right dashboards uploaded into it. Below the description of both the prerequisites with more details.

Pentaho Business Analytics platform

The Pentaho Business Analytics Platform has to be available to be integrated into your Angular application. As you probably know, the BA platform is deployed into an Application Server (usually Apache Tomcat) and can be installed in a different server (and IP address) from the Angular application you are developing.

There aren't specific requirements or customisations requested for the BA platform. The only relevant thing is that the Angular application should reach the Application Server using the HTTP or HTTPS protocol. As usual, the use of HTTPS is always suggested before uses encrypted communications.

In the following examples and tutorials, the BA platform is supposed to be up and running at http://localhost:8080/pentaho.

CTools dashboards deployed

Considering that the goal of the project is to render one (or more) Pentaho CTools dashboards into an Angular application, the dashboards have to be correctly available into the Pentaho Repository. We won't detail here how to develop a CTools dashboard into the BA platform. This is considered a basic feature you can easily learn with the standard books or learning paths offered to the developers.

Also in this case, there aren't specific requirements or customisations requested to the dashboards. The only requirement is that the RequireJS support has to be enabled in the dashboard settings (it is enabled by default, by the way).

If you have a vanilla installation of Pentaho BA Server and want to follow the examples below, take a look at the Appendix and check how to upload the two CTools dashboards used in the following tutorial.