On behalf of everyone here at Windward, we are pleased to announce the release of Windward Reports 2.0, a J2EE report generation product that produces reports to a wide range of export formats, including PDF, RTF, HTML (3.2 or with .CSS), and plain.

Windward Reports is differentiated from other reporting tools by the fact that it uses Microsoft Word as its layout tool. Both technical and non-technical users can design report templates, taking advantage of Word’s formatting features and WYSIWYG environment with no learning curve.

Version 2.0 adds the following features to Windward Reports:

- Native support for sql databases as a datasource for the report (Windward Reports 1.0 only supported xml data).
 
- Reports can include data from multiple datasources, including a combination of both xml and sql.
 
- Adapters can be written to provide data from any datasource including proprietary legacy systems.
 
- Command tags are even more powerful including; 1) Attributes in one tag can reference variables in another tag, and 2) Data output can be formatted and localized.

The company offers a free trial of Windward Reports.

For more information, please visit Windward’s website.

Sincerely,

The Windward Reports Team

ps – We continue to offer a free copy of Enemy Nations to anyone who tries Windward Reports. Details are at http://www.windwardreports.com/free.htm.

How does this compare to http://ireport.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html which is what I use for my servlets?


.V

With a quick look I would say the main difference is that in Windward Reports you use Word for your layout. If you've already learned how to use a reporting tool, that's not much of an advantage.

But if you don't already know a reporting tool, or you want to let non-programmers create reports, then you get a big advantage with Windward of almost no learning curve.

thanks - dave

The main advantage of Windward Reports (unlike other reporting packages) is that you don't have to embedded SQL in your report template. You just use xpath on a stream of XML which can be produce via your own code or automatically
 from JavaBean, Entity Bean or JDBC Datasource.

This why we choose it for our project.

It looks like there is no support for pagination of a long table with subtotals.
Did I missed something?

Yes there is. It's basically automatic. In Word you can set the top N rows of a table to be table headers and those rows will repeat on each page as the table is continued.

thanks - dave

I have asked about subtotals, not headers. How about them?

If you have subtotals in your data - yes. If not, then no.

One way to look at it is everything in your report is either what you typed in the word document or the data in the datasource. But it does no computations on the data. (That isn't 100% true as the if tag does a boolean evaluation of data - but for displayed data - it must be an element in your data.)

So if you want a subtotal at the bottom of each page, and that subtotal is based on what fit in a table on that page, that we cannot do.

thanks - dave

ps - We can format the output data at runtime - we just don't do calculations.

Hi,
we are using this tool since first releases. Our customer (big assurance company) remained impressed from the simplicity to design templates compared to other tools with own proprietary "designer" to learn and use.
Now they just use MS Word to edit template as your needs.
We have built a cluster of printer servers that eat several report each hour.

Great tool!

bye,
Luca Garulli