iReport QA

[marianol]

Hi,

I am Marina Ryzhikova, the Jaspersoft QA Manager. I am responsible for QA for all open source and professional edition releases.

We are looking for community members to help us:
 * Understand your usage and report development needs
 * Improve the iReport user experience by exploring iReport 3.1.4 and logging tracker tickets for any usability issues you note.
 * Improve the overall quality iReport by logging tracker tickets for any quality issues you note.

 If you are interested in helping with this testing, log in to the JasperForge, and log your bugs here: Bug Tracker for iReport Designer

 

[anandhk]

Hi I am new In Ireport want to learn the how to create chart in ireport and also I fired the query using ireport after that I want to do some calculation in the result set using that reslt I want to do with ireport have to do.

 

anandhzedo@gmail.com send mail this address

[lixiaokui11]

Hi,

     How to caculate a percentage of the pie chart's?

Thanks,

Li

[petruch]

Only part of the Axis Label Expression is displaying.  The attachment shows the value the Axis Label Expression set to and how only part of the expression appears on the graph. 

[petruch]

Forgive me I should have looked at what was in the database before I posted this. problem solved.

[ddavis539]

I've been using iReport for over 7 years to layout jasper reports and am very profient with the classic version.  I am extremely disappointed with what I've seen in the nb version so far.  There are so many subtle changes that dramatically decrease productivity, that it is a major step backwards.  I've attempted to report several issues as bugs, with most of them closed mentioning a an obscure but less efficient workaround.  The problems I'm having are so severe, I'm beginning to wonder whether or not I can continue to use iReport at all.

Among the problems I have with the new version:

1)  No support at all for barcodes.  This was extremely important in several of the postal and shipping reports I've created over the years.

2)  The new way of selecting multiple elements has several problems.  Previously you could hold down shift and quickly click around the screen to select multiple items.  If you accidently selected something you didn't want, you could simply click on it while holding shift again to de-select it.  If you tried to shift click on something and missed (eg clicked in an empty section), it wasn't a problem.  Now you have to double-click to de-select an item which is awkward.  Even worse, holding Ctrl and clicking an an empty area (easy to do with a complicated design, or when trying to click on a graphic line) clears out everything you've selected, forcing you to start over.

3)  copying and pasting is almost unusable now.  In the old version, you could select one or more elements then press ctrl C and Ctrl V to copy all of those elements.  The best thing about this under the classic designer was that as part of the paste, all of the copied elements were offset horizontally and vertically by 10 pixes and all of them were automatically selected.  This made it very easy to use the arrow keys + Shift to re-align an entire section to where it needed to be copied to.  Since many reports have similar graphic/text sections it reduced report design time. 

With the new product you can still select and copy multiple elements.  However, they are copied into the exact same x/y coordinates as the source and even worse they are not selected, which makes it really hard to reselect just the copies and move them to where they belong.  Instead of being able to copy 5 or 10 elements at the same time into correct position, it forces you copy each element one at a time, which really slows down the layout.

There also seems to be a limit on how many elements may be pasted at once.  I tried to select 62 elements from one report and copy them into the page of a different report.  For some reason only 7 elements were copied onto the other report.

4)  Under the classic version it was possible to manipulate the Z coordinate of graphic elements.  This was important when attempting to have text items in front of background image or background color filled graphic elements.  This was down by simply clicking on an element and choosing "send to back" or "bring to front".  That functionality seems to be lost in the nb version which makes it difficult to correctly layout reports with overlaid elements.

5)  Under the classic version it was possible to see whether or not a valid variable, field or parameter was being used in the popup properties editor by the color of text in the Text Field Expression section.  This was it was really easy to have the popup window open and click around the elements to check the variables being used.  Under the nb version the property sheet does not feature the same color highlighting for variable names.  To see it, you have to click on the elipse to open up the text field expression dialog.  This dialog has to be closed before choosing another element which again subtly slows down the editing process.

6)  having to confirm that I really want to delete something every time I press delete is annoying.  There should be a way to turn this confirmation/warning off for advanced users.

 

 

[Giulio Toffoli]

 

Hi Davis,

this is a very good feedback, it is really appreciated. There are many little details that still have to be adjusted in iReport nb, there is lack for many things that after years people just were used to (even if many of them are back with the 3.5.0 verision), but before go forward, let me spend a couple of words about why we decided to rewrite iReport and which are the benefits of using iReport NB. The old version (or classic if you prefer) works, and it works pretty well. During the years the JasperReports library is not grown very much, letting me the time to focus on many design shortcuts and usability improvements. But in the last year JasperReports is grown a lot, adding a lot of new advanced features. The internal architecture of iReport was limiting us from continuing to extending the application, and especially was limiting us to support the new features of JasperReports, many of which are still almost unknown just because people never moved to the iReport nb. Things like chart themes to change the chart look and feel, fonts extensions, multi-scriptlets, generic elements and custom components to create and support advanced content,  have  never been possible in the old version of iReport. We spent a lot of effort in creating the base on the ireport future, we did not waste time in giving iReport just a new buggy look and feel (even if unfortunately this is what may feel an expert iR 3.0 user on a fist glance). Today JasperReports and iReport are much more integrated then before, iReport uses the native JasperReports model and no more a custom model (source of many problems for years before reaching the stability that iR 3.0 offers and lacking of many JR tags support). The main benefit of using the JR model is that iR is no longer responsable to load and save the jrxml, problems checking is faster and what you see is exactly what you'll get (this is not true in the old version). You have now realtime chart preview in design mode, you can copy and paste a chart and a crosstab, if a new tag is not visually supported, it will not removed or corrupted by iReport because it is still managed by the JasperReports object model.
Soon a new manual of iReport will be available, it will help people to start working with iReport NB without facing the documentation obstacle, and one of my primary objectives in the next months will be to provide a lot of freely available documentation.

Now, let's walk trough your concern.

1)  No support at all for barcodes.  This was extremely important in several of the postal and shipping reports I've created over the years.

Barcodes will be soon reimplemented as a Custom component (this was supposed to be ready some time ago, it will be ready soon togheter with a new component to display bullet lists).

2)  The new way of selecting multiple elements has several problems.  Previously you could hold down shift and quickly click around the screen to select multiple items.  If you accidently selected something you didn't want, you could simply click on it while holding shift again to de-select it.  If you tried to shift click on something and missed (eg clicked in an empty section), it wasn't a problem.  Now you have to double-click to de-select an item which is awkward.  Even worse, holding Ctrl and clicking an an empty area (easy to do with a complicated design, or when trying to click on a graphic line) clears out everything you've selected, forcing you to start over

I hate the new way elements are selected, I'm rewriting the selection logic to make it similar to the old one.

3)  copying and pasting is almost unusable now.  In the old version, you could select one or more elements then press ctrl C and Ctrl V to copy all of those elements.  The best thing about this under the classic designer was that as part of the paste, all of the copied elements were offset horizontally and vertically by 10 pixes and all of them were automatically selected.  This made it very easy to use the arrow keys + Shift to re-align an entire section to where it needed to be copied to.  Since many reports have similar graphic/text sections it reduced report design time. With the new product you can still select and copy multiple elements.  However, they are copied into the exact same x/y coordinates as the source and even worse they are not selected, which makes it really hard to reselect just the copies and move them to where they belong.  Instead of being able to copy 5 or 10 elements at the same time into correct position, it forces you copy each element one at a time, which really slows down the layout.There also seems to be a limit on how many elements may be pasted at once.  I tried to select 62 elements from one report and copy them into the page of a different report.  For some reason only 7 elements were copied onto the other report.

Little details like paste in a slightly different location the elements and select them make the difference. We will replicate the same behaviour in the next version. I'll check the problem of copying many elements.

4)  Under the classic version it was possible to manipulate the Z coordinate of graphic elements.  This was important when attempting to have text items in front of background image or background color filled graphic elements.  This was down by simply clicking on an element and choosing "send to back" or "bring to front".  That functionality seems to be lost in the nb version which makes it difficult to correctly layout reports with overlaid elements.

Z-order is now manageable in the outline view just dragging elements in the right position. For an user used to the old version of iReport this kind of interactivity of the outline view (aka Report Inspector) is something of totally new. You can now drag an element from a band to another just using the outline view, change the parameters order, the z-order and so on.
Anyway I'll revert the two menu items you are talking about, togheter with other commonly used context-menu items like:
- Edit textfield expression
- Format tools
- Copy/paste style
- Transform in other element
and other shortcuts.

 5)  Under the classic version it was possible to see whether or not a valid variable, field or parameter was being used in the popup properties editor by the color of text in the Text Field Expression section.  This was it was really easy to have the popup window open and click around the elements to check the variables being used.  Under the nb version the property sheet does not feature the same color highlighting for variable names.  To see it, you have to click on the elipse to open up the text field expression dialog.  This dialog has to be closed before choosing another element which again subtly slows down the editing process

The editor is going to be improved a lot, and the feature you are talking about is just one of the many we are thinking about (including auto-completion and real syntax checking). But the kind of checking you are talking about are performed by iReport, see the Report Problems window.

6)  having to confirm that I really want to delete something every time I press delete is annoying.  There should be a way to turn this confirmation/warning off for advanced users.

Agree ;-)

Said that, did you see what you get in iReport NB that you have not in iReport 3.0.0?

- Ability to set reloadable paths in the classpath (i.e. to test a datasource you are creating, or a scriplet stored in a jar that you are deploying from an external IDE)
- Comprehensive support for export options (big lack in iR 3.0)
- Ability to really design at any zoom level (iReport 3.0 is not precise at all designing at zoom levels different than 100%), especially when using a grid and snap to grid.
- Integrated preview window and XML editor
- Undo/redo for all the properties (not for just some operations)
- Style editor
- Chart theme editor
- A faster and more precise report problem reporter engine (based on JasperReports)
- All the element properties on the property sheet (not just some of them)
- Many other little features present only it iReport nb (did you try to drag a field in a band different than the detail? Or add a label format to a pie chart? Or the pdf 508 assistant? Or the new page format dialog?

We need power users like you to go forward, to understand how to improve iReport in the right direction from an user prospective, to list all the features missing and to think about new usability improvements. All the stuff you mentioned will be implemented in the next version. Stay tuned.

Giulio

 

[jvmolto]

It is posible to return to properties popup?

I think the properties are visually more accesible from this

[frab]

We have been using iReport and JasperReports in our product for about 5 years now (since version 0.7).

 

We produce mainly shiping reports with barcodes for our clients and JasperReports is still doing this perfectly.

 

Recently we wanted to use Jasper as a report server for our application and wanted to generate reports either on a GUI request or on a batch request.  We studied JasperServer to do this but it was not the right solution since it is essentially a Web GUI solution. Maybe this need is fairly wide spread in the industry and it could be a good market for you since you have almost every thing to offer this kind of tool, I do not know...

 

Anyway, in the process I switched to iReport 3.1.4.  At first I was glad with the general look and fell of this new version but then, I was quiet desappointed (afraid ?) not to find any kind of barcode support. After a few hours, I found a workaround for this on the net but this point is extremely important for us and I am now reassured barcode will not be abandonned. I think barbecue was the barcode library formerly used, am I right ?  This project has been inactive since May 6, 2007. Could it be possible to use Barcode4J ( http://barcode4j.sourceforge.net/index.html ) instead or any other libray with more activity ?  EAN128 or event DataMatrix barcode support would be very nice features... 

 

For now here are the remarks I can submit to you from our experience. When I have the time to work a little longer with iReport 3.5.0, I will add new remarks and suggestions if I have any.  

Post Edited by B F at 03/31/09 12:47

Post Edited by B F at 03/31/09 12:48

[ejhellerattc]

I would like to second (or n-th by this time) the comments by ddavis. I have only been using iR for about  a year. If I had not started on the classic, I would have simply thought the nb version was simply a lacking IDE for report generation. Having seen the potential in classic, I think it is important to add these features in the very near future. While there are several new and very useful features in nb (and 3.5.0 is an improvement), the lack of certain basic operations makes it very difficult to develop any sort of complex reports. I am glad that ddavis was able to take the time to carefully articulate the areas that are missing, many of which are what is keeping me from using the nb version to develop reports. One thing I would add to the object selection process is the ability to rubber band (click-hold) more than one area. In classic, you could rubber band while holding the shift key to select several discontiguous areas. This allows the user to select these areas and apply a common change (height, width, etc.). The nb version resets the previous selection once the mouse is clicked off an object (regardless of the key chords pressed).

Thanks,

Ed.

[ope73]

Hi,

I humbly ask for your assistance.

I\'ve been trying to generate a report on ZuckerReport with iReport 3.0.0 on SugarCRM 5.2.0. So far all hsve be successiful till a point.

I\'m running Fedora core 8 O/S with Java 1.5.0 and am unable to launch iReport 3.0.0. I have been following a tutorial on the ZuckerReport-iReport, I Configured the iReport, I started a new Report, entered a report query, Designed a report and each time I click on Build to complile the report, I get a still or something like an hanged popup bringing out a BLANK REPORT. I thought by it time to load will solve the problem but I gave it enough time to load. I have no clue to it.

I have no errors when running the application and have no leads on this issue.

Please help.

Thank you very much.

 

ope73

 

[clarisys]

To help you understanding what we are doing:

We use iReport with a JasperReport custom server, filled by xml datasource.

We integrate iReport within a Python / Qt application.

Templates (jrxml) are stored / versioned in a database, and used directly by the server.

Our templates heavily rely on subreports, which are dynamically choosen from user data.

 

Now, some things I hate in ireport-nb:

 1) Property window, really hard to get for end users. Please give it back as in iReport-classic (left button on an element), it was fantastic :-)

 2) As said just before by someone: colors are a cool thing! Users are now use to thoses colors! (Green OK)

 3) Alignments are really cool things, Isn't it possible to get it like in the other version in the menubar ? (I've tried to create a new toolbar, no success)

 4) iReport-nb launcher do not understand files other than ".jrxml" files... So bad! Isn't it possible to add an extra argument in the command line to get thoses files opened as jrxml reports ? (Our users of iReport don't care of netbeans)

 5) Please give us the possibilty NOT to load previous opened files!!!! (Example: open a ".xml" file, Open a report, close iReport, launch iReport, the xml file is loaded!)

 6) Why drag & droping fields in the "display" between bands do not switch which band contains the element?

 7) Zoom / Page width was REALLY an amazing feature!

 8) Styles (Bold, italic, ...) in the designer view are hidden if the screen is not large enough, isn't it possible to get it back in the toolbar like "open, save, ..." ? (Like in office, openoffice, ...)

 

Things I love in iReport-nb:

 1) Customization, really amazing (but buggy :))

 2) It's fast, really! Good job!

 3) JR 3.5 full support

 4) Properties window can modify ALL things ! Really cool if it could be accessed with left button ;-))

 

 

Hope it'll help you improve this beautifull product.

Many thanks for that really good piece of code,

Best regards,

 

Laurent

[baggypants]

I created an align elemets toolbar with no problem in 3.5.0.

And I like the property window. once I shuffled a few other windows out of the way and got it to take up the whole right hand side.

[ddavis539]

I just wanted to come back and thank the development team for the many improvements included in the nb 3.5.1 release.  I dowloaded it the day it came out and am very pleased with the improved usability.  I created a multi-page report from scratch within one day with the new version, making heavy use of the new copy/paste functionality.  The quick turnaround has created some fans in our management team as well.

[clarisys]

I agree, 100% good features !

 

Many thanks iReport / JasperReports team!

[makweatan]

[6/1/09 10:09:24:821 SGT] 0000002e Digester E TRAS0014I: The following exception was logged org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Element type "topPen" must be declared.

 

How can I solve this? I am using iReport verson. 3.5.0 Thnx.

 

[makweatan]

What i did was deleting all the 'toppen, leftPen,rightPen, bottomPen"...along with the <box>      </box>....

The new version cannot read the .jrxml of the older version.

[amarshi]

 Hi,

          I have installed iReport 3.0.1 in netbeans 6.5.How to start using iReport for Visual Web Pack components.

There isn't any documents available.Please suggest me ,how to proceed.

 

Thanks

Amarshi

 

[gandeepan]

hi all ,

i have the following requirements

 1)User to be able to modify a report's output format after that report has been generated like edit format or hide column,

is it possible to do in any report solutions?

thanks in advance

gandeepan

 

[a_madani]

Hi everybody,

 

I just began making reports in Ireport. Everything works just fine. However there are a couple of things that are not so easy (if you don't have any Java knowledge that is).

I am trying to make a hyperlink reference in a column. So far so good. But how do set up the link so that it references to another report that i have made.

 

hope someone can help me

 

Many  thanx in advance

[kalinr]

Hi,

My name is Kalin Rashev and I'm using JasperReports and iReport since 2008.

I really like the products and they work really great! It is really easy and a lot of fun creating reports with Jasper products!

However, my reports are using custom JRDataSource implementation, which requires some java code to be executed before the iReport is started. I have integrated this perfectly with the classic iReport 3.0. I made a starter application which initializes my data source provider and then simply invokes it.businesslogic.ireport.gui.MainFrame.main(args); to start iReport.

The problem is that the new iReport 3.5.x is a NB plugin and I can not find a way to start the iReport from my application. There is simply no main method anymore, because it is no longer standalone application, but NB plugin! Starting iReport from another application is critical for me. As I read the posts in this topic, I made a conclusion that the classic iReport will not be upgraded anymore. So it is a matter of time to become incompatible with the new JasperReports features.

I believe the new iReport will soon have more cool features than the classic one and I can see it is being actively updated. I really want to switch to it, but that is not possible until I find a way to start iReport from another applciation.

Can somebody please tell me how to start the iReport NB from another Java application?

Thanks in advance,

Kalin Rashev

[richardc]

I noticed that grouping is missing in netbeans:

1. in classic, you can select items that you want to group,  right click and then select 'Group selected element(s)'

2. if you add elementGroup tags in the code and then go to Report Inspector, the label 'Element group' is missing next to document structure item

 

[Giulio Toffoli]

amarshi: About iReport you can find some tutorials in the wiki in order to get started.

a_madani: you need a backend application (like JasperServer). JasperReports does not include a drill down feature per se.

kalinr: you have to look at the netbeans platform. You can run it from your application, it's just a bit more complicated. Ask on
the NetBeans development forum to ask how to do it, or take a look at the start scripts to see what classes are executed.

richard: this has been fixed in 3.5.2.

Thanks

Giulio

[a_madani]

Hi

 

I have a question about the input controls. I want to have three drop down boxes on my report. The first one should be a simple single select query. The second box should only show values dependent on the value given in box 1. same goes for box 3.

Is there anyway to do this?

[kalinr]

The answer of my question

#58705

is posted here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/852320/how-to-run-ireport-nb-3-x-x-from-whithin-another-java-application

Post Edited by kalinr at 07/03/2009 11:57