| This section describes functionality that can be restricted by the software license for JasperReports Server. If you don’t see some of the options described in this section, your license may prohibit you from using them. To find out what you're licensed to use, or to upgrade your license, contact Jaspersoft. |
JasperReports Server’s Ad Hoc Editor is a browser-based, interactive tool for designing views and exploring your data:
| • | As a designer, the Ad Hoc Editor enables you to easily create and edit views and then use them to create reports. To create a view, select a data source, then select the data source fields that should appear in your view. The Ad Hoc Editor’s interactive display enables you evaluate your design without first running the entire data set. Finally, you can save the view, create a report from it, and export it to several file formats. Ad Hoc views can also be embedded in Dashboards. |
| • | As a data explorer, the Ad Hoc Editor provides analysis options (such as slice, pivot, and filter) to help you recognize trends and outliers in your data. You can drill into specific details or analyze your data at a very high level. For example, you might create a crosstab that shows the kinds of products a customer purchases together. Though your intention in creating the crosstab was to rank the popularity of certain items, the crosstab might also reveal correlation between customers’ purchases. These correlations may give you insight into how to improve your business. For example, you might run a promotion to encourage the correlation, or change your store layout to expose customers to more options. Understanding your data can help you make better decisions. |
The interesting trends and anomalies revealed by data exploration can lead you to create a view or report highlighting your findings. Conversely, while creating an Ad Hoc view, you may identify a trend that warrants further investigation. You can move seamlessly between the two activities—view creation and data exploration.
This chapter contains the following sections:
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