Need further Information about JasperReports

[mkr-fr]

Hello everyone,

my company is currently using Birt 2.2 for reports. We are not using the Birt Designer, but generate the reports dynamicaly with the API. Now we wanted to upgrade to Birt 2.5. But because of the very complex usage over API, combined by our dynically generation of the reports this resulted in many problems. In words: Nothing works anymore. I've spent a whole week now fixing the problems, but there is no end in sight. The poor Api-Doc of Birt doesn't make the problem any better.

Now we are looking for other report-engines like Jasper reports. But before evaluating JasperReports I have a few questions:

- How good is the API Documentation for the JasperReports API

- How fast is the reponse time of questions in the forum? (Maybe an answer to this post answers the question allready)

- How complex is the JasperReports API to use?

- If JR is updated: How dramatic are the changes normaly? This means: How many time would I have to spent migrating the changes?

 

Greetings Marco

[svenn]

API

Here's the online docs

There also manuals that you can buy and sample reports available.

Response time

How fast is the response, well that depends. This is a volunteer forum so sometimes its fast and sometimes you might never get a response period. If you want a guaranteed response you could always get the licensed version of Jasper Reports.

Ease of use

For your use case it's probably no more complicated then what you’re currently doing.

Updates

Jasper has regular updates. Usually they are pretty good about building in some backward compatibility. I never had any problem moving reports between versions.

[mkr-fr]

First: Thank you for your answer Svenn! You gained Karma ;)

@Second: I now downloaded the comunity Version of JR. Now I'm searching for informatioan about how to create a report out of java without having a jrxml-File. For example I would like to create a ReportDesign-Element and add various Report Items like labels or tables to it. From that the jrxml should be generated. I'm sure this must be possible, but I can't find any peace of documentation about how to do this. In fact i laughed about the "Getting Started Guide" I found. Step 5: "Buy the guide" :) Well for avaluation this isn't really.. let me say comfortable. Now my question is: Does anyone know a site or something where JR Beginners get simple tutorials about API usage? Or is this Ultimate Guide really the only source of information about this?

Greetings Marco

 

[svenn]

You can find some samples here

http://jasperforge.org/website/jasperreportswebsite/JR%20Website/jasperreports_samples.html?group_id=252&header=project&leftnav=yes&target=jasperreports

We do not manually build our reports so I  can not help you there. Try searching the forums. This comes up from time to time.

 

 

[fishermania]

I use ireports to build our base JRXML report and templates. Here some links for info on Jasperreports and ireports. On the left or middle there is links for FAQ, tutorial, samples, and more documentation.

 

Jasper Reports

http://jasperforge.org/website/jasperreportswebsite/trunk/documentation.html?group_id=252

 

Ireports

http://jasperforge.org/projects/ireport

http://jasperforge.org/plugins/mwiki/index.php/Ireport/Tutorials