Speeding up iReport integration

Jasper Reports integration improvements

Recently, the jasper_reports integration module received another improvement.

We added a specific menu entry at:

text Administration → Customization → Jasper Reports → Jasper Reports

It looks like this:

The screen is much more user-friendly than the low-level XML Report interface. It allows users to select the model and upload reports directly.

Compared with previous versions, it has also been improved in the following ways:

• It is no longer necessary to press the Update from attachments button.
• Users can upload multiple subreports.

With these recent changes, we believe the next step for improving the integration is to add a new Fields Provider class to iReport and allow it to connect directly to OpenObject.

This would provide several advantages:

• Add an entry called OpenObject in iReport, making it easier for users to remember instead of asking them to select XPath.
• Compile and preview reports with translations by using our tr() family of functions.
• Preview reports using real data.
• Display field names in the user's language, as happens currently, but without concatenating the internal field name.
• Browse structures deeper than five levels, which is currently almost impossible.
• Avoid having to create an XML file with the OpenObject client before designing or redesigning a report.

Of all these features, only the first one has currently been implemented:

However, this feature is not particularly interesting by itself, as it simply displays the XML fields provider. Its main benefit is avoiding the slightly confusing requirement for users to select XPath.

The remaining features are not especially difficult to implement, but they require several hours of work that we cannot currently afford to finance alone.

However, if you believe you can contribute code or funding, we can make them available sooner. Once implemented, these improvements will save all of us a considerable amount of work.

For more information, contact us at:

• info at nan dash tic dot com
• albert at nan dash tic dot com