Best practice for changing attributes in JRXMLs?

[bothfeld]

Hi,

just finished with the raw design of a pretty large report with a couple of subreports, we realised that for instance all reportElement tags need to have the attribute positionType="Float" - oops.

OK, should not be a big deal with XSLT, but there are CDATA sections inside, leading to trouble with this approach.

So we used regular expressions. At the end it worked but it was kind of painful way to get there. Don't get me wrong I like regexps somehow but the junior developer who was doing the job had to learn it the hard way ;-)

 

So what was your experience when you had to perform global changes? Are there any tools out there we missed?

 

Kay Bothfeld

Post Edited by Kay Bothfeld at 11/20/08 18:57

[donal]

I avoid that problem by have style's associated with all elements. That way you can just change the style definition and all report elements which use it are updated. I keep the styles external to the report design jrxml file so that I can reuse them amongst reports.