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

Report Expressions

Report expressions are a feature of JasperReports that allows us to display calculated data on a report. Calculated data is data that is not static and not specifically passed as a report parameter or a datasource field.

Report expressions are built from combining report parameters, fields, and static data. By default, report expressions can be built using the Java language. However, JasperReports can support any other language supported by the JVM. The JasperReports project file includes examples of using BeanShell and Groovy to build report expressions.

Note

Since by far the most commonly used report expressions are Java expressions, we will only cover those. Refer to the examples distributed with the JasperReports project ZIP file, if you need to create expressions in BeanShell or Groovy.

We have already seen simple report expressions in the form of report parameters and fields. We can use any valid Java language expression that returns a String or a numeric value in...