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In this chapter, you’ll see what the requirements are for using iReport, the way to obtain the binary distribution and the sources, and how to compile and install it.

The heart of iReport is an open source library named JasperReports (JR), developed and maintained by Teodor Danciu, of JasperSoft Corporation. It is the most widely distributed and powerful free software library for report creation available today.

In this chapter, you will learn about report structure; you will see which parts compose a report and how they behave in comparison with data to print.

In this chapter, I will explain elements , the main objects that can be inserted into a report, and survey their characteristics.

You can save time defining the look of your elements by using styles. A style is a collection of predefined properties that refer to aspects of elements (like background color, borders, and font). You can define a default style for your report that all undefined properties of your elements refer to by default.

In a report, there are three groups of objects that can store values: fields, parameters , and variables . These objects are used in expressions, they can change their values during print progression, and they are typed, that is, all these objects have a type that corresponds to a Java class such as String or Double.

In this chapter, I will explain how to manage bands and groups by using iReport. In Chapter 3, you learned how reports are structured, and you have seen how the report is divided into bands, horizontal portions of a page that are printed and modified in height according to band properties and content. Here, you will see how to adjust the properties of bands. You will also learn how to use groups and how to create some breaks in a report.

Subreports represent one of the most advanced functionalities of JasperReports, and they make possible the realization of very complex reports. The aim is to be able to insert a report into another report created with modalities similar to the first one.

There are several ways in JasperReports to provide data to fill a printed report; for example, you can put a SQL query directly inside a report and provide a connection to a database against which to execute the query and read the resulting record set.

JasperReports 0.6.2 introduced some new features for report internationalization. Internationalizing a report means making all static text set at design time (such as labels and messages) adaptable to locale options used to build the report: the report engine will print the text using the most appropriate available translation. The text translations in the different languages supported by the report are stored in particular resource files collectively named the Resource Bundle .