The natural way to install a Pentaho Sparkl Application is definitely the Pentaho Marketplace. Sometimes, you may want to manually install a Pentaho Sparkl Application to test it, customize it or to do what you want.
In this tutorial I would like to share the simplest way to install it, starting from the Sparkl distribution of an existing application. To make everything simplest and related to a real scenario, we will see how to manually install A.A.A.R. into an existing Pentaho BA Server.
Prerequites
Before starting to work on our goal, let’s define the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform (on its version6.0.1.0-386) installed into our machine. If you don’t have it installed and you don’t know how to do it, please follow this tutorial.
Getting the Sparkl distribution of the application
Once the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform is up an running, let’s get the Sparkl distribution of A.A.A.R. from the official Sourceforge repository. Clicking on this link, you’ll start to download a single file in a ZIP format.
A Sparkl application looks like a ZIP file, containing some specific files and folders and everything is requested from your application to work. To have a closer look to a concrete and quite complex Sparkl Application, you can extract the AAAR_v4.2.zip file and take a look into it.
Manual installation of the Sparkl application
Once the Sparkl distribution of your application is into the file system of your server, the manual installation into the Pentaho BA Server is very easy. Pentaho BA Server comes with a complex structure of folders, but if you see, there is one folder in particular that works for us. The folder is located into the path described below.
<biserver-ce>/pentaho-solutions/system
In this folder you will find a lot of subfolders and some of them are Sparkl applications. Not all, but only some of them are Sparkl applications. By default the sparkl folder, for example, is a Sparkl application that manages the Sparkl interfaces. A little bit tricky to explain but very modular and smart, isn’t it?
Now that you know what the system folder contains, to install your Sparkl application, simply extract the ZIP file into it. After this simple task, restart the Pentaho BA server and that’s all. Isn’t it extremely easy?
Checking the installation
To check for the correct installation of your Sparkl application, only after the BA server has been restarted, access to the Sparkl dashboard (see below the menu item to click).
And then see your application in the Sparkl application list.
Conclusion
In this tutorial is described the simplest way to manual install a Sparkl distribution of an application. To make everything simplest to understand and related to a concrete scenario, we have seen how to manually install the Sparkl application A.A.A.R. into an existing Pentaho BA Server.