Many business applications require the generation of reports as part of their functionality. A report is the representation of data in a certain format for a particular audience. A Report Generator (or Report Viewer) is an application or an application module that allows end users to visualize and download reports. Very often, a report generator takes data from a database and produces a document in a format suitable for printing on paper. We will focus on this type of report generator in this chapter. There are many ready-to-use report generators with advanced features, such as business intelligence and analytics, but these systems are out of the scope of this book.
In this chapter, we'll learn how to render JasperReports in a Vaadin application without having to deal with report designers or XML design formats. Instead, we'll use a Java...