Cascading parameters

[mdahlman]

Cascading parameters is a commonly requested feature. We can't do it today (Sept 2008). Here are some details about the topic.

The cannonical example is this: First choose a country, then the input control for states gets populated appropriately. Choose state, and then the city input control gets populated appropriately.

It's more accurate to refer to them as "cascading input controls" since it's really the input controls that have dependencies on each other rather than the parameters themselves. People sometimes ask if JasperReports supports cascading input controls, but this probably doesn't make sense. A better question is whether JasperServer supports cascading input controls. The "cascading" happens between the input controls, and these are JasperServer objects rather than JasperReports objects.

Cascading input controls plus a publicly supported runtime input control API are known enhancement requests. They are not scheduled to be part of the Topaz release.

[lana_getz]

Cascading parameters feature was implemented in the old reporting tool (JD) as an add-on distributed per customer request. It was implemented on the client side (DHTML+JavaScript), which required pre-loading all the data to populate input controls. So for example of countries and cities we had to send all countries and cities to the client and then apply JavaScript to show only cities for selected countries. Sometimes this approach presented performance problems.

For JasperServer implementation I suggest using Ajax for dinamically retrieving list of cities for selected country.

So far multiple customers requested this functionality, but none came as far as sponsoring the implementation of the feature. Perhaps once we implement this, we can offer it  on eShop?

[Guest]

Luke Shannon is scheduled to build a cascading parameters for Jaspersoft v3 for Nacamar in October.  We are planning to give that to SmartBrief & eWork and contribute it to Engineering if they want it.  Contact Luke for more info.