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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Configuring the Google Maps Dashboard Sample using Pentaho BI Server and CTools.


In a separate blog post (http://syntharch.blogspot.com/2013/01/quality-of-life-kpis-measuring-human.html), I have started listing Social KPIs and Measures that could be used for measuring a range of social development outcomes. In this post, I will see how we can combine all these to create a BI dashboard that is driven by the performance of different government organizations using open source tools.

Starting Pentaho BI Server

In previous posts, we discussed installing Pentaho BI Server Community Edition, as well as Community Dashboard Tools on top of it. Let us navigate to the place our Pentaho BI Server is installed and start the Tomcat instance that ships with it.

On my machine, it as follows

> cd Work/Servers/Pentaho/biserver-ce
> ./start-pentaho.sh




Now, once the Tomcat instance has started, we can access the browser to launch the application. For me the URL is http://ub1204.arthgallo.com:8082/pentaho


Logging in the instance with the default username and password, we are shown the familar screen containing the home page.


I decided to check some sample dashboards and accessed the Google Maps dashboard on Steel Wheels sample, only to be told that since I was not on localhost, I should obtain a new Google key.



Turns out Google has deprecated much of the API key. The new API key management is centralized and it shows all the services that are available and their activation status.


As you can see, I activated the Google Maps API v2 and v3. Now clicking on the label for API v2, takes one to the page where the default key is visible. I deleted that key and could see a page as below.


I clicked on the button to create a new browser key, and entered the server address as below.


Clicking on the Create button, creates the key.



I now navigated to the folder on the BI Server installation, where google settings are stored. I can see a single file called googlesettings.xml.


I opened the file for editing in the text editor and entered the new key.


Now, we can go back to the application, restart Tomcat key and see the dashboard as follows.


We have the demo running now. In future posts, we will setup our own dashboards.

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