I have been working on this for some time and have never seen anyone post how to do it. This morning the light bulb went on. I wrote a small app to parse a mal formed xml document and pass the results as a collection to ireports. I was very happy to get it working and several posts in this forum helped me accomplish this. So now I wanted to use this data in a much larger report. Here is how I did it. Create a subreport using your current datasource settings. Create a new Parameter called MyDataSource set the class type to net.sf.jasperreports.engine.data.JRAbstractBeanDataSource Set the default value expression to your bean info new JRBeanCollectionDataSource(com.chris.jasper.xmlFactory.getURL()) Open the properties of the sub report. Select the subreport tab.