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

Downloading JasperReports

JasperReports can be downloaded from http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports. When visiting the JasperReports download page, you should see an image similar to the following around the middle of the page:

Downloading JasperReports

JasperReports can be downloaded by clicking on this image. Once you click on the image, you should see a window similar to the following on your browser:

Downloading JasperReports

Clicking on the JasperReports 1.2.2 link at the top left cell should take you to a page containing a tree displaying current and previous versions of JasperReports.

Each node in the tree contains three download links. It is not always clear what exactly is downloaded by clicking on these links. For this reason, a brief explanation for each link is given next.

The first link is to download a JAR file containing a subset of the JasperReports functionality. Specifically, it contains classes that can be used to display jrprint files, which are reports in JasperReports' native format. This file is offered...