Re: Next assignment - Reports

I am going to release it this morning, Mountain Time (promise!)

If I understand your question correctly, the Jasper engine is called from RPG and runs in a JVM that is instantiated for the life of report creation (job) and then the JVM is destroyed when the job ends. If you are asking where do you get the RPG Report Engine, I'll release it both to my Pete's Workshop web site at the same time I post it to OpenSource4i.com and I'll post those links here and at midrange.com.

Why would I create a "designer" when one already exists? There is a "transition area" between a designer like iReport and "prompt and run" solution where all the user can do is to choose the values for selection on the report. In some cases, a designer that allows column selection, breaking, sorting and some basic formatting options without all the bells and whistles of something like iReport can be a highly useful tool. I haven't thought beyond the basics but I may just scale back iReport to a few essential functions and release that as the SWT version. The HTML version is needed for the web centric world we live in.

Like any open source project, we'll have to see how this unfolds. I post more in a bit.

Pete


Scott Johnson wrote:

Pete,

Where do you have the Jasper engine running for this?
Why the need for .7 & .8 when iReport exists?

-- ScottJ

Pete Helgren wrote:

Nathan,

You mentioned that Jasper Reports isn't an option but I am putting the finishing touches on an RPG wrapper for Jasper Reports called "RPG Report Engine". It is loosely based on the concepts that Scott Klement uses for the HSSF wrapper and Aaron Bartell uses for the RPG Chart Engine he wrote that wraps the jFreeChart API's. The 0.4 release I am working on doesn't currently have the "static" engine that RPG Chart Engine has where Aaron implements the engine running in a subsystem job and uses data queues to process the chart requests (eliminating JVM startup costs) but I plan to implement something similar as soon as I have the API's done. The current version would start and end a JVM with each submission.

The report outputs to PDF, HTML, XLS, RTF, TXT, CSV, ODT and has an option for emailing the completed report (using Javamail). I am working on the final test case now (passing report parameters) and hope to have it done tonight or tomorrow because I need to deliver it to a customer on Thursday (!)

In this case the report designs would be static (you could use iReport to create them) but the report would accept parameters so you could capture them in your form and pass them to the RPG wrapper.

The .5 release will add the "static engine" option.

The .6 release will add a rudimentary query to Jasper conversion tool.

The .7 release will add a scaled down WYSIWYG designer (swt)

The .8 release will add a rudimentary HTML designer

The .9 release is a placeholder for requested enhancements.

Just an FYI if other alternatives don't materialize for you.

Pete