The appearance of a chart can be configured using the Properties view when selecting the chart in the Design view. You can edit properties common to all charts and graphs (such as the title and the visibility of the legend) as well as properties specific to the chart or graph that is being created.

The Properties view includes the following tabs to easily set properties: Appearance, Borders, Hyperlink, Chart, and Chart Plot. There is also an Advanced tab where you can manually set all the different types of properties.

Currently, JasperReports takes advantage of only a small portion of the capabilities of the JFreeChart library. To customize a graph, a class must be written that implements the following interface:

net.sf.jasperreports.engine.JRChartCustomizer

The only method available from this interface is the following:

public void customize(JFreeChart chart, JRChart jasperChart);

It takes a JFreeChart object and a JRChart object as its arguments. The first object is used to actually produce the image, while the second contains all the features you specify during the design phase that are relevant to the customize method.