Reporting problem

[sajjad ahmad]

Hi everybody there
we are developing an online inventory managment system using J2EE technologies for IBM platform...
out client has already purchased Websphere for this application and now they can't affrod a good reporting tool like crystal reportsor any other in the market ....
so we have to relay on the free reporting tools available in the market...
we are currently researching to select any suitable tool...
however i will realy appriciat if u share ur experience with us if u had have the same problem in ur project .. and also guide us which is the best free tool available in the markit ...
best regarsds
[ April 16, 2004: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]

[Bear Bibeault]

Sajjad,
JavaRanch is a community of people from all over the world, many of who are not native English speakers. While using abbreviations like "u" instead of spelling out "you" is convenient when text messaging your friends on a cell phone or in a chat room, it presents an extra challenge to those that are already struggling with English. Additionally, such shortcuts may confound automated translation tools that patrons of the Ranch may be making use of.
I would like to ask for your help in making the content of JavaRanch a little easier to read for everybody that visits here by not using such abbreviations.
thanks,
bear
JSP Forum Bartender

[Winston Smith]

Sajjad,
We've use the following software products to produce dynamic, web-based reports:

FDF Toolkit for Java

JFreechart

The FDF Toolkit is free and available from Adobe. We've used this software to dynamically populate pdf forms from a web environment. Basically, we have servlets which accept data from any number of sources (html form, JavaBean, etc.) and populate the pdf form with the data. This works nicely since you can create multiple templates for your reports in pdf format, and simply call the appropriate servlet to handle the report. Since the final report is in pdf format, it can be viewed directly from the web, printed, or saved to the client's local machine.
JFreechart is a Java-based library which allows a developer to create dynamic charts and graphs (very easy to use). Once more, we've used this library in a web-based environment to display dynamic charts.
One additional product you may want to look at is iText. I haven't tried this out yet, but I believe you can create pdf documents on the fly (using Servlet/Bean), and one nice feature is that you can incorporate images. So, you can use JFreechart to create the dynamic chart, then import the chart into a pdf.
[ April 16, 2004: Message edited by: Winston Smith ]