iReport Designer

iReport Designer

This past day I have been learning how to accessing data and make reports out of it by using a software named iReport Designer. Basically, with this software you can access your database and print the desired data in a custom designed report; you can edit the position, color, border, etc with this program.

As quoted from its developer’s website.

There are several ways to add reporting capabilities to an application. For many web developers, to create a report just means to create a web page, which produces good results on screen but poor results when printed to paper. And to create a report in PDF means write more code… tons of code, making the reports hard to maintain and long to write. When working with other technologies the problem does not change very much. For example, Java provides an extensive API for printing, but there is still a lot of work to write specific code for each document format.

The answer to this problem is to use a reporting library. JasperReports Library is the world’s most popular open source Java reporting library, and iReport Designer is a visual report designer for JasperReports. The library is a report engine that can be integrated in your open or commercial application to generate the reports designed with iReport Designer, display them on screen or export them in a final format like PDF, OpenOffice, DOCX and many others. Alternatively, you can stream the result through a web application or send the final document directly to a printer. JasperReports is in some way the core of iReport Designer.

JasperReports is extremely easy to integrate in an Java application, but if you need an environment to use the reports without having to write a custom application, you may consider using JasperReports Server.

JasperServer provides a web based interface to manage, schedule, and run the reports; a repository to store all the report resources like images, fonts, data sources and much more; a security service to decide who can execute which report; and a web services API to execute the reports from external applications (so you can generate reports from any kind of environment, like PHP or .NET).

In the big picture, iReport Designer allows you to design reports, JasperReports allows to execute them and generate output in a Java application, and JasperServer allows both end users and external applications to access, view, and publish your reports securely. JasperServer also makes reports interactive by adding drill down and drill up capabilities to your documents.

Here is an example of how you use the designer.

Designer View

And here is how it would look on the PDF/printed.

Printed / PDF View

Interested in learning iReport? A good read to learn about this software: Jasper Reports 3.6 Development Cookbook. You can find the overview and also step-by-step of each process.

JasperReports 3.6 Development Cookbook

To give you the big idea, here are the chapter titles.

1. Chapter 1: Creating Static and Dynamic Titles and Headers
2. Chapter 2: Working with the Body and Footer of your Report
3. Chapter 3: Enhancing the Look and Feel of your Report
4. Chapter 4: Working with a Variety of Data Sources
5. Chapter 5: Multi-page Reports
6. Chapter 6: Multi-column Reports
7. Chapter 7: Summary Report, Crosstabs, and Graphs
8. Chapter 8: Java Wrappers for your JasperReports
9. Chapter 9: Using Mathematical and Logical Expressions

I found this book to be very helpful with a lot of examples that surely will help you a lot in creating your own desired report.