ReportingEngines has announced a new version of their Formula One e.Report Engine that includes the ability to access and generate reports from in-memory Java objects, in addition to RDBMS, EJBs, flat files and XML data streams. The report engine is a Java tool for extracting, formatting, and delivering data as PDF, XML, DHTML, HTML, CSV, or email reports.

Check out Formula One e.Report Engine.

Their press release talks about the new features and gives interesting opinions as to why reporting from in-memory objects as a datasource is better than reporting from RDBMS data.

Isn't ReportingEngines an Acutate subsidiary?

Sandeep

Actuate, I mean.

Yes It iS.

http://ireport.sourceforge.net

.V

Good news!!

I have not found one decent report generator that could be used with J2EE apps...something that could convert say xml to do and xls format. I guess all reporting tools are all for the Swing world...J2EE apps are an afterthought!I hear itext(is that what it is called) is good to generate pdf. But like I said above nothing to convert xml to doc or sml to xls.

http://cocoon.apache.org/

Yes, I agree, don't know why Cocoon hasn't been more popular. We are using Cocoon for all of our J2EE user interfaces.

Peter, like to know how you're using Cocoon with J2EE. Perhaps we can stir up some discussions here with TSS...

Tools like Cocoon (XML/XSLT transformation) might be very flexible but in my experience they are far from being convenient and far from boosting productivity. It is plain stupid to code FO coordinates manually when any decent WYSIWYG report editor can do the job in 1/100 of the time. I think that old good report generator’s approach is the best in many cases.
Personal toolset:
- we do use Jasper and iReport on production and very pleased with them. By the way: Jasper Report directly support using collection of java beans as a data source.
- have used rReport (http://rreport.8m.com/ )and liked it;
- sometimes do use XML/XSLT transformation for reporting, but it is less convenient and we have plans to get rid of it.

PS: Have considered buying e.Report Engine but pricing model did not satisfied us.

JasperReports was designed with the abstraction of different data sources in mind. That's what makes it a winner. (JFreeReport the same). We implemented its DataSource interface to implement holders of tabular data that come from different sources (RDBMS-s,flat files,EJB-s and XML streams).
Used in conjunction with the iReport designer they really make a good team and boost the productivity.
Hope to see the same level of data abstraction from Formula One and...even more
Genri

I use RootRiver Delta (http://www.rrsys.com) for reporting with J2EE apps. In detail, that's PCL 5 for printing, PDF for previews, and CSV for delivering data to Excel users.

HTH
Fokko

> apps...something that could convert say xml to do and xls format. I guess
> all reporting tools are all for the Swing world...J2EE apps are an
> afterthought! I hear itext(is that what it is called) is good to generate
> pdf. But like I said above nothing to convert xml to doc or sml to xls.

I use Jasper Reports + iReport for paper reports (through PDF), POI for Excel reports and JSP for HTML reports. If you want to tailor report to specific target format, you have to use specific technology.

For instance, sometimes you should put formula in Excel cell instead of calculated value, let Excel to break pages, do subtotals, draw charts and calculate pivot tables. For this kind of Excel reports you may use open source Jakarta POI, Formula One e.Spreadsheet Engine or COM interface (directly or through generated VBScrip).

Nebojsa

We're using JReport (from JInfoNet) for a report writer, and it's adequate, with mediocre support. I played a bit with iReport/JasperReports and it seems to be close but not quite up to the JReport quality level.

Has anyone tried Crystal's Java support? I know it's Windows only, but they claim to support data sources from any Java class that implements ResultSet (this is very similar to JReport).

Hello Friend,

 

We are running 150 bedded NON-PROFITABLE hospital in India and have started development of Hospital Management System using JAVA platform. We also inquired for the help which is paid from Jasper report creator but we got the reply that, that paid help is not updated and we would not find help to configure Jasper report with JBOSS server.

 

We have decided to use Jasper report engine tool for reporting purpose. As to generate report directly using Jasper report, we are using iReport tool to design report and iReport uses jasper report engine and create .jasper file as the output.

 

I started and run successfully iReport tool for create report. Now i want to run same report with JBoss Application server.

Could you provide step by step information on how to configure Jasper report engine with Jboss server and then where to place .jasper file and how to access and run same report from .jsp file ?

 

We are in hurry so please send us reply as early as possible.

 

Any suggession would be appriciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Kartik Mehta

Software Engineer

Hi,

I use StyleReport/Pro by InetSoft. I have been very satisfied. Does HTML/DHTML, PDF, CSV, Excel, RTF, Postscript, CSV.
It is commercial, but worth it. Integrates well with any datasource. Has a very good API.

Tilo

Tilo, the StyleReport/Pro (InetSoft) demos look nice. Do you know how much it costs (ballpark)?

Thanks.

Well, tried the trial Formula One e.Report ..

wanted to access our EJB datasource, but no dice ..

first of all, the dialog where you enter all the java.naming info is broken. You can enter one thing, but it'll remember another no matter how many times you retype it, hit enter, apply etc.. not even reopening the dialog will help on this, one solution : restart the application. Not good.
second, getting it all right the first time(and only time you get), i'll get a ClassCastException. no stack trace no nothing.. of course i've set up classpath to all essentials, even tried including the same j2ee.jar thinking it could be EJBObject or similar.. still no dice..

So standing evaluation of the EJB connectivety from here is : thumbs down..

Have you tried EspressReport?

Sandeep

A year ago I wrote a reporting tool for a J2EE app. Generated XSL-FO from a servlet which could be processed by a customer specified XSL style sheet and then ran through Apache FOP to produce PDF.

It worked OK, had problems because FOP creates a DOM tree of the XSL-FO which is a fairly verbose XML format anyway so it ended up using vast amounts of memory (like 200-300Mb for large multi-page reports) to create the PDF. Quality wasn't bad though.

FOP can be found at http://xml.apache.org/fop/
Info on XSL-FO can be found at https://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/
XEP which is a commercial tool from RenderX that does the same as FOP can be found at http://www.renderx.com/

--
Paul

I think the key point being made here (by the ReportingEngine folks)is the ability to use Java objects and consequentially an existing object/domain model to design reports, as opposed to being constrained to work with both relational and object-oriented paradigms for reporting/analysis/mining and transactional needs respectively.

It would be good to have an open source tool that could do this. I think that it also wouldn't be too difficult to layer the infrastructure over an ORM tool such as Hibernate, so that reports will be (mostly) portable across databases.

Sandeep