ibrewster

I have a bunch of reports that I design where the data is displayed in a simple columinar format. Currently I am designing these reports by 1) Creating all the fields in iReport designer, 2) placing all the fields, one-by-one, in the detail section of the report designer 3) tweaking things till my fingers fall off. This is, obviously, a pain in the neck - I have to place all the fields, try to guess at a reasonable size based on the expected contents, and then tweak all sizes untill everything fits. If I add a column (field), I then have to resize everything after that. Heaven forbid I want vertical borders betweent the fields, as then I would have to move a dozen (or more) tiny vertical lines as well. I would much prefer to be able to say "Put these fields in a table layout", and be able to resize columns by draging boundries, much like I would in excel. Is this possible, and if so, how? I have looked at the "table" object, but it keeps asking me to create a "datasource", rather than just being able to use the fields I have already created.

Looks like I just needed to update my jasper reports server to version 5, at which point it no longer mattered that there was no class specified in the XML

I am using iReport designer 5.0.1 on Mac OS X to create a report template including some number fields to which I want to apply formatting (number of decimal places). As such, I set the Expression Class in iReport Designer to java.math.BigDecimal and the Pattern to ###0.0. However, when I run the report, it appears to ignore the pattern. Researching this further, it appears that this problem is caused by a lack of the "class" attribute in the textFieldExpression node, and sure enough adding in the class attribute manually to the XML causes the numbers to format correctly. However, as soon as I make any change in iReport Designer it wipes out the class attribute again. Is there any way I can keep iReport Designer from wiping out the class attribute, or, better yet, get it to automatically add the class attribute? It looks like this was reported as a bug at one point (see the thread http://community.jaspersoft.com/questions/539863/ireport-411-corupting-text-field-expression-class) but that refers to version 4.1.1, and the link to the bug report doesn't appear to be working.