Ivan Lagunov's Blog

I've provided a general overview of possible solutions to get a reporting/exporting functionality in the previous post . This is the second overview of alternatives based on JasperReports reporting engine. Since the previous part I've done the following: Implemented a simple report using both DynamicJasper and DynamicReports to compare them from technical side. Investigated JasperServer features and tried to implement a simple report for JasperServer instance (it appeared we already have a ready licensed installation of JasperServer that makes it unreasonable to install a fresh one). First, the comparison results of Java libraries (DynamicJasper and DynamicReports): Both libraries suffer from poor-quality or missing Java docs but they look a bit better in DynamicJasper. Taking into account the point 1, a developer has to use online documentation and to review the code. Here the code looks definitely nicer and more readable for DynamicRepo

My current goal is to obtain an universal solution to be able to export application data in any format I'd prefer. Mainly it includes exporting tables with various data. I've done an overview and have considered the following alternatives: Own implementation. Here I mean implementation of own Java library that will accept some abstract data (say, valuelist) and will perform export using known open-source libraries (MS Office Excel - Apache POI, PDF - itext, etc). This is the way we've already used at work before. The critical disadvantage of this proposal is that much efforts will be required. Existing solution. This is also known as reporting engine software. Main points: JasperReports is the most popular open-source reporting engine. There are 3 ways to use it: JasperReports API - gives complete control on report creation but is extremely complex. Different visual report designers (e.g. iReport) - allows creating report templates manually. Software tools