Book Image

JasperReports for Java Developers

Book Image

JasperReports for Java Developers

Overview of this book

JasperReports is the world's most popular embeddable Java open source reporting library, providing Java developers with the power to easily create rich print and web reports. This book shows you exactly how to get started, and develop the skills to get the most from JasperReports. The book steers you through each point of report setup, to creating, designing, formatting, and exporting reports with data from a wide range of datasources, and integrating JasperReports with other Java frameworks. Starting with the basics of adding reporting capabilities to your application, and creating report templates you will first see how to produce your reports through the use of JRXML files, custom ANT targets, and then see preview them in both the browser and the native browser of JasperReports. Getting data into your reports is the next step, and you will see how to get data from a range of datasources, not only databases, but XML files, and Java Objects, among others. You will create better looking reports with formatting and grouping, as well as adding graphical elements to the report. You will export your reports to a range of different formats, including PDF and XML. Creating reports will be made even easier with a walkthrough of the iReport Designer visual designing tool. To round things off, you will see how to integrate your reports with other Java frameworks, using Spring or Hibernate to get data for the report, and Java Server Faces or Struts for presenting the report.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Creating More Elaborate Reports

In the previous section, we created a fairly simple database report. In this section, we will modify that report to illustrate how to add images, charts, and multiple columns to a report. We will also see how to group report data. We will cover how to do all these tasks graphically with iReport.

Adding Images to a Report

Adding static images to a report is very simple with iReport. All that is needed is to click on the image tool icon.

Adding Images to a Report

Then outline the area where the image will be placed on the report. In this example, we will add a company logo to our report.

Adding Images to a Report

As we can see, iReport puts a placeholder image inside its outline. To enter the image expression (recall from Chapter 7 that an image expression is an expression that resolves into the location of the image, which can be a URL or a location in the file system), we double-click on the image to obtain the following window:

Adding Images to a Report

We can either type in the image expression or, if the image is in a local or network...