JasperReports 1.0, a free reporting library, has been released. With this product, XML report templates are used to generate ready to print documents using data from customizable data sources, including JDBC. The output can be delivered to the screen, printer, or stored in PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV and XML format.

Excellent. I am glad to see they are moving forward.

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=63F53188-256B-44D9-A48A-894F0635FB35

Very good. This is a handy little library.

Combination of Ireport ( for Report Designing ) and Jasper Reports makes a good open source choice for reporting in Java . Though the pdf and html export options are good , implementatiop for XLS, CSV and XMl is still not upto the mark. The updation to the paid advanced guide is taking lot of time .From last 2-3 months the advanced guide is not available and is still being updated !.The best part though is alternative data sources for generating data

First of all: CONGRATULATIONS. It is simply a great tool.

But (there is always a but), IMHO you shoud consider that a piece of sw like that is not complete and ready to be used, until a piece of doc (pay doc or free doc, pdf doc, or bookstore 500$ book) is not equaly complete. I've been using it for years now and it is frustrating to see lots of people that has abandon it for out-of-sync documentation.

I think that you have done a GREAT job, but know you should sit back, relax, take your time and write a GREAT documentation. It`s like you have something powerfull but you can´t use it because you don´t know how, then it`s like you don´t have anything at all.

Thanks again (for listen and for a great tool).

First of all: CONGRATULATIONS. It is simply a great tool.But (there is always a but), IMHO you shoud consider that a piece of sw like that is not complete and ready to be used, until a piece of doc (pay doc or free doc, pdf doc, or bookstore 500$ book) is not equaly complete.

What about the "The JasperReports Ultimate Guide"?

First of all: CONGRATULATIONS. It is simply a great tool.But (there is always a but), IMHO you shoud consider that a piece of sw like that is not complete and ready to be used, until a piece of doc (pay doc or free doc, pdf doc, or bookstore 500$ book) is not equaly complete.

What about the "The JasperReports Ultimate Guide"?

"The JasperReports Ultimate Guide" is usually out of sync, does not cover all parts of the tool and is truely the "Ultimate Guide", no other way to get more information (apart from the newsletter, that doesn`t always meet your needs).

Excuse me if it sounds too bad, but I repeat: I think it is SIMPLY A GREAT POWERFULL TOOL, but hasn`t been used so widely as it should because of a poor documentation (til now, of course).

Since JasperReports was previous supported by an individual(s) but now is supported by a real company, I would believe that the documentation issue is being resolved. I think the link I posted said something about JasperSoft putting more people on JasperReports.

With the arrival of BIRT, they will now have to kick it into high gear. I think the move on JasperSoft's part was a realization of this and we will probably have two good, well documented and supported OSS based Reporting tools. Additionally, it will force other vendors to make similar moves. (Are you listening/watching Cognos/Business Objects?)

I previously blogged (JRoller) on this when Crystal announced their Eclipse plugin.

I can't find what new/improved features are in 1.0

Is this just new release naming politic (previous release was 0.6.8) or a big move?

How about the "What's New" link. It is in red on the front page. :)

How about the "What's New" link. It is in red on the front page. :)

Have you try to click on "What's New" link ?

It looks like 4 random and not very new features.

How about the "What's New" link. It is in red on the front page. :)

Have you try to click on "What's New" link ?It looks like 4 random and not very new features.

Yes, I did try yesterday cause I was curious as to what was new. I don't remember what was new before but some if it does look new. According to some other sites, those are new. (ie http://today.java.net/pub/n/JasperReports1.0 )

BTW, does anyone know what is wrong with SourceForge? It is intermittently not there.

I have used JasperReports for report generation. If your requirements are only for well known templates and predictable content size for PDF generation, JasperReports might be OK.

When your layout includes a large body section that spans two pages you have to do a lot of tweaking|hacking to get it working. If the content size is not predictable and you have to rely on resizing, JasperReports is not impressive. It is geared for PDF transformation and it XLS transformation was particularly problematic.

There was also couple of issues with lanscape mode in XLS and extending the code so that we could customise the footer generation. The way it is designed to do the transformation was not cleanly separated. It was very difficult to customise the code.

Its visual designer was OK but needed a lot improvements. I had to manually edit the XML docs to refine the report templates.

I have not used the lates version this might have changed.

Hello;

In that case, please take a look at http://www.windwardreports.com

thanks - dave

Hello;In that case, please take a look at http://www.windwardreports.comthanks - dave

Wish I had something like this in 1996, had to build my own report to word system.

I note that one thing that hasn't changed is the ability to do charts. In 1996 I had to write VB code to merge a template (word file saved as XML) with data then open the merged file in Word to programmatically to create a pie graph, or similar. I've not played with word's internals since then but after looking at the windwardreports site I see no "graphing" examples so I assume this limitation still exists.

I guess you could use some external graphing library to dump out a graphic to be loaded into a word template but the other point of reporting to word was having a "real" word document that editors could inspect and make adjustments before releasing to the public. Some of these adjustments included tweaking the pie charts.

Hi;

Re the question about Windward Reports and charting - it is in version 4.0 which is in final beta. You can download the beta with charts & graphs from our website - http://www.windwardreports.com

Re the comment/question about poi & xls files - yes that is correct. However, as the reports come from a Word template, there are no macros in the source template either so it's a non-issue in our case.

Moving forward, we will probably support Excel files as a source also which will mean macros - but that is version 4.1 or 5.0.

thanks - dave

From what I can see, both JasperReports and WindwardReports use POI when it comes to XSL files. POI can not do things like charts and macros. Is there any Java reporting tool that is fully featured when it comes to XSL files?

Exactly.

I've used it for my previous company to do some real reporting, and it's very limited in many cases.

I thought so many responses of it being good is that they needed only very simple reporting, and is happy to live without proper documentation, including the outdated "The JasperReports Ultimate Guide", and uncommented source code (so clean that you'd think someone has strip away the comments).

Imagine someone making uninformed decision to use Jasper and is stubborn enough not to consider anything else just because it's top at sourceforge, no matter what you have tell them, and pay for the guide and yet nothing useful in it.

People might tell you to RTFM, alright, so I had to go through the source line by line, and I think the structure need serious improvements, talking about OOP here. The thing is, I think they'll have problems with legacy, because many people already hacking the Jasper to achieve what they want, and patching Jasper to do it the right way will break all the hacks. Besides, the hacks were actually suggested in the user forum.

Think twice before making a decision.

I've used it for my previous company to do some real reporting, and it's very limited in many cases.

Well, I was able in a few minutes to get it to do something that isn't possible to do in ReportNet (they tried for months). And if you know how much ReportNet costs ... :)

If you are hamstrung on generating generating Excel reports, we at workbeans are near completion of version 1.0 of our product (September 1, 2005). It's a pure Java API which provides a clean API to generate Excel files in both binary (Office 97 and later through POI) and XML (SpreadsheetML) formats and will support the new Office 12 XML file format.

example:
FlowComposer f = new FlowComposer(Orientation.HORIZONTAL);
f.put("Hello World").format(Color.AQUA, FontWeight.BOLD);
f.link("http://www.google.com").format(BorderLineStyle.DASH_DOT);
f.next(); //skip a cell
//create 5 cells with these values
f.put(new int[] {1,2,3,4,5}).format(FillPattern.BRICKS);
f.nextSeries(); //next Row
f.put(Boolean.TRUE).format(
FontName.TAHOMA, Underline.SINGLE, Span(1,3);

//generate in Office97Binary file format and write to file
Excel97Driver.doExecute(flow).writeToFile("ExampleO97.xls");

//generate in Excel XML (SpreadsheetML) and write to file SSMLDriver.doExecute(flow).writeToFile("ExampleSSML.xls");

Send me an email (eric at workbeans dot com) if this might be something that would help you out. (I can provide a few no cost licenses at least until we go 1.0).

Cheers,

M. Eric DeFazio
eric@workbeans.com

If you need to integrate Excel reporting into existing Java application you may want to take a look at jXLS - http://jxls.sourceforge.net/
It's a very light library that allows you to perform Excel export using XLS template files. Usage is extremely easy. One of its advantage (or disadvantage?) is that you create report template in real Excel editor (like MS Excel or OpenOffice Excel). It processes JDBC ResultSets as well.

Still no cross tabs? When do you think Cross Tabs will be adding to JasperReports?

--Tyler

There seem to be a few repeating issues in this discussion, which I would like to answer. First off, I work for JasperSoft, so these are informed answers, not somebody's guesses.

First off, JasperReports documentation and the Ultimate Guide have been brought us several times. Yes, a new version is coming, and should be available in August. The existing Ultimate Guide had gotten out of date, and with the new features just added it needed a pretty big updating. We decided not to delay the release of 1.0 until the Guide is available, on the belief that their are users out there who can look at the new samples and figure out how to use the new features without the guide.

The 1.0 release is a major release, as it included integrated charting for the first time. The other main feature solves a lot of the "out of memory" errors people encounter when running very large reports, and allows reports to be effictively limited by disk space, not RAM.

The chart integration eliminates the needs to call a charting package in your code and then pass an image to JasperReports. You now simply place the appropriate chart type in the report design (ie Pie Chart, Bar Chart, HighLow Chart, etc) and set up the mapping from the input data to the chart series, and you are done. You can now add charts to a report in minutes instead of hours.

Finally, on the subject of cross tabs, all I can say is that it is coming. We need to do a fair amount of work to handle the unknown number of columns in the layout, and as one poster mentioned JasperReports has some challenges with very wide reports. Once that is solved cross tab reports will be added.

-Barry Klawans
Chief Technical Officer
JasperSoft

Barry,

    Congraduations on your new release from your old friend.

    I just downloaded and like to try it out

Chester Chen
(cchen at clearstorysystems dot com)

The new charting feature is really cool :)

Cross Tabs are coming, which is great. Can you elaborate on the timeline. I ask because we have some projects here that will need crosstab functionality, but probably not until October or so.

Thanks,
   Tyler

What about performance?

I mean, Does JasperReports use precompiled-xsl or something like that?

Anyone have any experience with DataVision?
http://datavision.sourceforge.net/
how does JasperReports compare?

Well I've been trying DataVision for the last few days. Comparing to iReport, DataVision is very simple to use, light weight and therefore faster. Though it has very limited options specially in designing a report.

I'm still going for DataVision for my current project because its faster and less error prone.