Speeding up iReport integration

Albert Cervera i Areny 30 d’ag. 2009

Recently jasper_reports integration module received another improvement. We added a specific menu entry in "Administration" -> "Customization" -> "Jasper Reports" -> "Jasper Reports" and it looks like this:


The screen is much more user friendly that the Low Level -> "XML Report" and allows selecting the model as well as directly uploading the reports. It has also been enhanced with respect to recent versions in that it's no longer necessary to press the "Update from attachments" button and users can upload multiple subreports.

With recent changes we feel the next steps we should carry on to improve integration is adding a new Fields Provider class to iReport and allow connecting to OpenObject directly. This would allow:


  • An entry called "openobject" in iReport which makes it easier for users to remember (instead of telling them to use "XPath")
  • Compiling and previewing reports with translations (Using our tr() family of functions)
  • Previewing reports with real data
  • Viewing Field names in user's language (as currently) but without the real field name concatenated
  • Browsing to a depth higher than five levels, which is currently almost impossible.
  • Avoid the need of creating an XML file with OpenObject client before designing (or redesigning) a report

The only implemented feature of all this is the first one:


This, however, is not very interesting as it simply shows the XML fields provider. So it just avoids making it a bit odd for the user having to select XPath.

The rest of the features are not very hard to implement but require some hours of work we can't currently affort to finance alone. However, if you think you can contribute with code or money we can make it happen faster and they're advantatges that will save quite some time of work to all of us once implemented.

So if you're interested you can contact us at "info at nan dash tic dot com" or contact with me directly at "albert at nan dash tic dot com".

Amunt