Company Report Designer

Report templates are created using the visual Report Designer. Report Designer supports creating elements, changing their attributes and controlling all aspects of element presentation and layout. All attributes and related information is saved in a template file in XML format.

The Designer also supports visually building queries against multiple types of data sources and specifying data grouping, summarization and element data binding. Dynamic behavior can be associated with elements using Script capabilities.

The focus of this document is the Java API. Details on using Report Designer are covered in the Report Designer. For information on starting Report Designer, see Starting Report Designer.

Data Sources for Reporting

If no datasources are configured when the Designer is started for the first time, it will pop up a dialog to request the location of the data source and query registry files. When creating your own application, you can specify any path as the query and data source registry files. If they do not already exist, they will be created automatically.

For example, we can use the data sources and queries defined in the examples/docExamples/datasource directory:

 c:\{InetSoftInstallation}\examples\docExamples\datasource\ query.xml and
 c:\{InetSoftInstallation}\examples\docExamples\datasource\ datasource.xml 

Report Layout Options

InetSoft reporting supports two types of layout models: flow-based layout and tabular layout. When a new report is selected, the Designer prompts for the type of report. You can select a flow based report or a tabular report.

“We evaluated many reporting vendors and were most impressed at the speed with which the proof of concept could be developed. We found InetSoft to be the best option to meet our business requirements and integrate with our own technology.” - John White, Senior Director, Information Technology at Livingston International

Report Classes

A StyleSheet object represents a flow-based report, a TabularSheet object represents a tabular report, and a BeanSheet represents a report bean. The three classes share many common operations that apply to both types of report. The common API is captured in the ReportSheet class.

If a program needs to use API specific to StyleSheet or TabularSheet, it can cast the object to the correct type. However, the most commonly used methods on a template, namely data binding and report processing, are available in ReportSheet class. Therefore, it is rarely necessary to perform type casting.