alexeysem

See my answer few comments above: "To sum it up: currently there's no way to keep the comments." And just don't waste your time on this issue... If you need comments in the beginning of the end of the file, you could just keep them in a separate file (e.g. "file.jrxml.comm") and expand your building tool to merge them before a check-in. Note that you'll go straight to the hell after your death if you follow this advice :)

Sure, especially if it will be a complete replacement of iReport for me: will feature publication to JasperServer, a sort of round-trip to/from the xml source code and also will not crush my Eclipse too often :)

Hi, I mainly edit reports using one of the excellent xml editor plugins in Eclipse (namely, Oxygen XML). Visual editing is convenient only on the initial steps or when customizing styles and looks, for everything more complicated writing and updating JRXML by hand is much more convenient, especially given it's very simple for reading, understanding and writing and has a clear xml scheme. Thus, for writing styles, variables, query, groupings etc etc my primary tool is the xml editor. Looks like you guys tend to undervalue it's role in the life of an ordinary JasperReports coder :| Yes, I think that at least a warning in the logs would be fine, anyway much better than nothing. Thanks and regards.

Hi, As you might have noticed, every time you do something in iReport's visual editor and then switch to the jrxml source, it looks like it fully reformats the code. Actually, as they say, it doesn't simply reformat, it simply exports the internal representation of the report. So, what iReport works with is only that internal representation, and surprisingly there's no place in it for preserving the original formatting or at least the comments. To sum it up: currently there's no way to keep the comments. I personally treat this as a miserable failure, as the whole JRXML language seems to be very well focused on being readable and understandable, especially compared to e.g. BIRT reports, which quickly become huge and monstrous. I guess they just didn't have time or spare hands to implement this feature. Hope this helps, A.

Matt, thanks for the quick reply, very useful, even though your answer is "no". I don't know the details of the styles' implementation in JasperReports, however this seems possible. The condition just defines the values for the style's parameters, or the template style from which these values should be taken. Accordingly the schema, condition only can be defined in the jrxml file, not in the files with style templates, so there's actually no problem with referring to variables/fields. Also, <style> element nested in <conditionalStyle> has attribute "style" which means that it should accept a reference to a parent style, and it doesn't. Imho this is a 100% bug, isn't it? So, from my point of view either @style should be removed from <style> nested in <conditionalStyle> or this functionality should be implemented properly. What do you think? I'm going to post a corresponding bug in the JasperReports bugtrack. Thanks, Alexey

Hi, I need to implement a different colouring for odd/even rows in a table, and keep these styles information in a separate styles template. Is there a way to do that? Now I'm trying the following, based on what I've found in "The Definite Guide to Jasper Reports". Styles template file: <style name="Table Details 1" isDefault="false" style="Default" mode="Opaque" backcolor="#E5F5FA"> <box> <pen lineWidth="1.0" lineStyle="Solid" lineColor="#003A63" /> </box> </style> <style name="Table Details 2" isDefault="false" style="Default" mode="Opaque" backcolor="#FFFFFF"> <box> <pen lineWidth="1.0" lineStyle="Solid" lineColor="#FFFFFF" /> </box> </style> Jrxml file: <style name="Table Details Cond" style="Table Details 1"> <conditionalStyle> <conditionExpression><![CDATA[boolean.valueOf($V{REPORT_COUNT}.intValue() % 2 == 0)]]></conditionExpression> <style style="Table Details 2" /> </conditionalStyle> </style> Surprisingly, this doesn't work, style "Table Details 2" is never used, which means that switching to a different style template conditionally isn't possible. However, I really do need to keep those styles in a separate template. Is this a bug?.. Any ideas, how to overcome this feature? Thanks in advance.

Hi, I have a very short question. On saving a jrxml document in iReport it does reformats the xml source code. That would be okay if it didn't also remove all comments. This is rather annoying as I 1. cannot leave any comments for the further supporters of the very non-trivial report I'm developing 2. cannot comment elements I don't need while debugging. So, is it possible to disable source reformatting in iReport, or fine-tune it to keep the comments? I hope it is... Thanks in advance.