Renaming a pdf file - different naming convention?

[shija03]

Now that I have the scheduler running and cranking PDF files, I'm running into a new series of problems:

 

1- The naming convention that jasperserver follows when creating a report file (when the reports are NOT to be overwritten) is by placing a timestamp...

 

2- There appears to be no way (from the Jasperserver GUI interface ... the browser) to rename the generated files by the scheduler to another name... is there?

 

My Questions:

 

Is there a way to 'easily' provide a different naming convention or at least be able to format the date stamp (without having to dig and open code) where I could place some sort of java expression and get my file's appended date in the way that I wanted?

 

Assuming that the appended date to the generated pdf file was always in the format of: yyyyMMddHHmmss

 

Is there a way to place a formatter so the date expression could be altered to yyyy_MM_dd? Or whichever way I desired to?

 

I think it would be great to provide entry points to some fo the definitions where users with little java knowledge (or just knowing a particular class String, Date, SimpleDateFormat...) could alter some of the behavior of engine... Flexibility and customization without having to open the code, recompile, recycle the server...

 

Is there a way I could rename the name of the auto-generated pdf files, once they have been created in the tables ... easily??? Even if I could just go to MySQL Browser and alter the entries by hand (For now...)

 

Is there a way to pre-append other fixed terms to the future file name to be generated by JasperServer's scheduler?

Post edited by: shija03, at: 2007/06/29 17:45

[lucianc]

shija03 wrote:

Is there a way to 'easily' provide a different naming convention or at least be able to format the date stamp (without having to dig and open code) where I could place some sort of java expression and get my file's appended date in the way that I wanted? Is there a way to place a formatter so the date expression could be altered to yyyy_MM_dd? Or whichever way I desired to? I think it would be great to provide entry points to some fo the definitions where users with little java knowledge (or just knowing a particular class String, Date, SimpleDateFormat...) could alter some of the behavior of engine... Flexibility and customization without having to open the code, recompile, recycle the server...

 

Currently you can do this by extending a JasperServer class and overriding a method. The extended class can be specified then in a (Spring) configuration file. I'm not sure what you mean by "opening" the code, but note that this would not imply changing the JasperServer code, it would only extend it.

 

Doing this without writing Java code (by only changing configuration files) would obviously be an improvement. That's what feature requests are for.

 

Is there a way I could rename the name of the auto-generated pdf files, once they have been created in the tables ... easily??? Even if I could just go to MySQL Browser and alter the entries by hand (For now...)

 

Currently there is no resource renaming functionality in JasperServer; I believe it is scheduled for the next release. It is of course possible to directly update resource names (jiresource.name) in the DB, but that might prove dangerous therefore it should be attempted with caution.

 

Is there a way to pre-append other fixed terms to the future file name to be generated by JasperServer's scheduler?

 

I don't understand what you mean by that or how you would like to achieve it.

 

Regards,

Lucian

[shija03]

Lucian,

 

 

Thanks for the responses - let me clarify the some of my questions:

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "opening" the code, but note that this would not imply changing the JasperServer code, it would only extend it.

 

To me opening code means to have to write Java - wether it is just to extend or having to touch the original source. I believe that using the spring framework we should be able to do a lot more. You see the more classes I extend the more painful my deployment becomes, since on every new release, I have to rematch all my changes (I've done this in the past with other projects - and it can become rather painful and fustrating...)

 

I like Pentaho's approach on how the provide a high level of flexibility through their workflow designer - I can extend some functionality just through configurations, yet their dashboard pages require Java programming knowledge - rendering the application very unappealing. JasperServer does a nice initial job on the web entry point for configuring and deploying jasper report definitions - though there's lot of more work before it can be compared with Cognos or B.O. (Business Objects)

 

Is there a way to pre-append other fixed terms to the future file name to be generated by JasperServer's scheduler?

 

Currently the file naming convention followed by jasperserver's scheduler is:

 

<report_definition_name>-<yyyyMMddHHmm>.pdf

 

I would like to have the option to specify my own file format through a configuration:

 

"MM_dd_yyyy".pdf where the date format would follow on SimpleDateFormat convention

 

Thanks again for the replies - BTW, what's the goal of JasperServer? - does it want to become as competitive as B.O. is? Jasper Reports did a very nice job matching what Crystal Reports were able to do.