Ad Hoc Views and Reports

Question:

What are the general advantages of creating a report against an ad hoc view as the data source as opposed to creating a report directly against the relational data source? Why do we need to create Ad Hoc views before creating reports anyway?

Answer:

An Ad Hoc views presents data for users to explore and analyze in the JasperReports Server Ad Hoc Editor. The data can come from a user’s Topic, Domain, or OLAP data source. Ad Hoc views can only be accessed through JasperReports Server interactive designer web UI.

A user can create Ad Hoc view reports only from Ad Hoc views. This report is considered “dependent” on that view. The Ad Hoc view report contains static template content derived from the Ad Hoc view when it was created.

The data set retrieved from a data source for Ad Hoc views and Ad Hoc view reports is cached in the server and can be reused if a similar Ad Hoc view query is executed. This will improve the performance for real time data exploration and analysis.

Ad Hoc view reports can be executed in foreground and back ground standalone outside Ad Hoc Editor. Keep in mind  that, when modifying and saving an Ad Hoc view, its dependent reports are not updated. If a user opens an Ad Hoc view in the Editor and add a column to it, that column will not show up in previous reports created from that view. In such a case, the user may want to save the updated view with a different filename to avoid confusion.

If a user needs to explore and analyze data before creating a final report, then using the JasperReports Server Ad Hoc Editor to create a view and its report is the only choice.

If the user just wants to create a report directly against the relational data source without analyzing the data first, then the user could use Jaspersoft Studio (or iReport Designer) design tool to create the report and have this “query based” “regular” report, as often referred to by Jaspersoft, deployed to the server.

A data set used by regular reports (vs. Ad Hoc view reports) is not stored in Ad Hoc cache. Users need to code their report queries for regular reports. Ad Hoc view reports' data is presented through Ad Hoc view from other data sources. SQL query coding expertise is not required for users to create Ad Hoc views and reports.

TTC-20141124