For a long time Pentaho has had a plugin called CFR
This is actually a really great plugin – Check out the facilities it offers. Secure and easy file transfer to and from your server. Great.
The API is excellent – clearly well thought out. It even offers security! Fantastic! In true google style, it does a simple clear thing very well without being over complicated. Precisely what you expect of a plugin.
However; The downside is that the embedded CDE components either don’t work at all, or are incredibly flaky/inflexible. (They only recently got updated for Pentaho 8 and don’t seem to have been tested)
So; At the end of the day, the UI side is simple, why do you need one of these components. It’s the API that is the real value of CFR, so just use it directly. Here’s how:
- Make sure you’re NOT using a requireJS dashboard.
- Import the jquery form resource:
- Add a text component
- Put this in the expression:
function() {
var uploadForm = '<form id="uploadForm" action="http://SERVER:8080/pentaho/plugin/cfr/api/store" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">';
uploadForm = uploadForm + '<p><input id="fileField" type="file" class="file" name="file"/>';
uploadForm = uploadForm + '<input type="hidden" name="path" value=""/>';
uploadForm = uploadForm + '<p><button type="submit" class="submitBtn">Upload File</button></form>';
return uploadForm;
}
- put this in the post execution
function() {
$('#uploadForm').ajaxForm({
dataType: 'json',
success: function(res) {
var filename = $('#fileField').val().split(/[\\/]/).pop();
alert("Success! " + filename + "-" + JSON.stringify(res));
Dashboards.fireChange('paramUploadedFile', filename);
},
error: function(res) {
alert("Error:" + JSON.stringify(res));
}
});
}
Test it!
How does it work? Well the expression creates a standard HTML File upload form on your page. This is bog standard HTML, nothing unusual here. The hidden input field for the path can be set accordingly if you like (this is the target folder in CFR, I just used the root for now)
The Post Execution is where you use ajaxForm to hook into the form. This is where you handle the response, errors and so on. At this point, once your file has uploaded, you’ll probably want to hit a Sparkl endpoint to trigger loading of the file you’ve just uploaded. Thats a simple runEndpoint call..
Hurrah!
It makes more sense to control the UI from scratch anyway, rather than use a component – primarily because you gain 100% control.
How did I figure all this out? Pretty easy really – Just look at the source code (while it’s still available!)
For folk local to London, PLUG is on Monday April 23rd, Don’t miss it!
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