Jasper Report or iReport or Both

[Mark Reyes]

Hi All,

I need report capability in my web apps but I am currently confused.

I always see the Jasper reports as the choice here being suggested by many. But I also see, the topic on iReport which is the
gui report designer of Jasper report.

Now, I havent done some thorough reading on both topic.

My question is, which is which? I mean, should I need to learn jasperreport first before ireport? Or the other way around.

In a web app, do I need both also? Or I am good to go with iReport only or jasperreport only.

Thanks..

[David Newton]

iReport is a GUI for JasperReports. It helps you lay out reports visually. You *may* be able to get away with using iReport only, but unless you know what it all means, it's unlikely to work well (and I always had to go back in and edit the JR file by hand, but I haven't used iReport for ~1-2 years, so it's probably better now).

I'd suggest you read a bit more thoroughly, though, because iReport has zero to do with web applications. It *designs* reports.

[Pradeep bhatt]

You will need ireports to create jasper reports, so I suggest you get started with iReports first.

[David Newton]

You most certainly do not need iReport to create reports. It may make some things easier, but it's not necessary at all.

[Sean Clark]

Hey,

We're currently using JasperReports/iReports on our project and while it makes some things easier, other parts are slightly more complicated and it is difficult to get some good tutorials on using it.

You will need to know Jasper Reports in the form of how to use the .jrxml file (the jasper source file) or .jasper file (the compiled file) and how to pass in parameters etc as iReports only generates these files for you.

We wanted to pass javabeans into this rather than allowing JR to have a direct database connection and this again proved quite difficult and there was a lack of documentation on this, but maybe it is easier if you do. I believe that JR can also use hibernate settings etc if you use this.

Personally go for both if you are going to use JR, but while it's an IDE it doesn't make things the simplest (in my opinion).

Hope that helps.

Sean

[David Newton]

Passing in beans shouldn't be a big deal; the JR Struts 2 plugin does this by implementing a data source implementation--what issues did you have?

[Sean Clark]

Hey

Well it wasn't difficult once you knew how, I just thought there was very little documentation (perhaps also relying on google a bit more than I should have), but we used JR's JRBeanCollectionDataSource in the end, but like I said we got this is the end. It's not quite as big a deal as I made it seem in my last post. I think it was also to do with that when using iReports, to get test data for iReports to use, you needed to select a datasource, which after much reading up you could do using a static class to produce a List of test data objects. Again didn't think there was much helpful documentation on this.

Sean

[Pradeep bhatt]

The jasper reports /ireports pdf files are availble for a small fee.Better purchase those