Visual component support?

[christiaan_se]

Hi,

can someone elaborate on the feature:

- generic component support to allow extending the functionality of the
JasperReports engine by plugging-in custom-made visual components that
would take data as input and produce content that is embedded into the
resulting documents;

What does it do and how can I use it? (eg. can I embed swing components in the report?)

kind regards,

Christiaan

[lucianc]

Component support allows JasperReports users to design their own custom report element types.  For instance, one could design a chart report component that uses a different (than JFreeChart) charting engine.  Custom components are included in report templates.

Along with report components, generic print element have also been introduced.  Such elements can be included in generated reports and are meant to be managed at export time by custom handlers.  The goal of print elements is to allow report exporters to generate non-standard output, i.e. output that cannot be generated by the vanilla report exporters.  For instance, generic print elements can be used to include Flash movies in report HTML export.

You can check the "barcode", "genericelement", "jchartscomponent" and "openflashchart" samples (the last one is only currently present in the JR SVN trunk) to see what custom components and generic elements can do.

Regarding your specific question, you might be able in the future to include Swing-based generic print elements in a report, although you would have to find a solution for exporting such elements to formats like PDF or HTML (if you're interested in such output).  I said in the future because for the moment only the HTML exporter supports generic element handlers.

Regards,

Lucian

[glen]

If I want to write a custom component where do I find documentation and sample code ?

Post Edited by Glen Bremner-Stokes at 03/27/09 15:03

[lucianc]

For sample code, see the 4 JasperReports samples listed above.

The JasperReports API Javadocs are the only formal documentation for the moment.

Regards,

Lucian