Chapter 1, Creating Static and Dynamic Titles and Headers, focuses on basic things such as creating, sizing, positioning, and enhancing the titles and headers of the report.

Chapter 2, Working with the Body and Footer of your Report, covers working with the body and footer of the report, including using parameters to filter records during report processing and implementing nested hierarchy.

Chapter 3, Enhancing the Look and Feel of your Report, shows you how to enhance the look and feel of your report by deploying and reusing styles, and by using designs, textual effects, background images, and watermarks.

Chapter 4, Working with a Variety of Data Sources, focuses on advanced things such as working with a variety of data sources: relational data, XML data, model beans of Java applications, and also multiple relational databases at once.

Chapter 5, Multi-page Reports, teaches you to build a cover page and table of contents for multi-page reports, conditional reset page numbering, display multi-dimensional page numbering, design multi-page reports using sub-reports, create separate header and footer for each sub-report in your Master report, and much more.

Chapter 6, Multi-column Reports, covers topics such as dividing the body of a report in multiple columns, grouping records with common value in a report column, filling data in report columns horizontally and vertically, inserting column break in your report, controlling the size of each column independently, and using sub-reports to design multi-column reports.

Chapter 7, Summary Report, Crosstabs, and Graphs, covers designing simple and multi-level summary reports, cross-tabs with dynamic rows and columns, creating bar charts, embedding a bar inside a tabular view, and displaying data trend graphs in your reports.

Chapter 8, Java Wrappers for your JasperReports, covers generating a report from a Java Swing application, generating a report from your web application, printing a hard copy of a report on the fly from within your Java code, viewing your report as a PDF, or a web page, or an XLS sheet, and so on.

Chapter 9, Using Mathematical and Logical Expressions, covers mathematical and logical expressions such as counting the number of records with a particular field value, grouping records, applying styles to your data based on logical or mathematical conditions, and so on.

The following software products are used in this JasperReports 3.6 Development Cookbook:

This book is for Java developers who want to use JasperReports to create user-friendly business reports. It is for those who may be familiar with JasperReports but want to dive into advanced JasperReports activities.

If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you can also learn how to design business reports using iReport by following the recipes of this cookbook.

Although the primary audiences of this cookbook are report designers, Java and XML developers will find this book useful in understanding how Jasper's XML code works and how to wrap JasperReports functionality in your Java Swing or web applications.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: Open the Pattern.jrxml file from the Task5 folder in the source code for this chapter.

A block of code is set as follows:

<staticText>
<reportElement x="107" y="10" width="340" height="33"/>
<textElement>
<font fontName="Verdana" size="24"/>
</textElement>
<text><![CDATA[Monthly Customer Invoices]]></text>
</staticText>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<jasperReport
<title>
<band height="94" splitType="Stretch">
<!-- other JasperReports XML tags -->
<image>
<reportElement x="365" y="10" width="180" height="80"/>
<imageExpression class="java.lang.String">
<![CDATA["X:\\Images\\packt.png"]]>
</imageExpression>
</image>
</band>
</title>
<!-- other JasperReports XML tags -->
</jasperReport>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

uncompress iReport-nb-xx.tar.gz

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select Currency from the Category column and click the OK button."

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