Thanks Pete, our target are Documents (Contracts + General Conditions +
Specific Conditions), do you think Jasper Reports can do them?
I was wondering if Pete Helgren might respond to your questions. Since he
seems to be otherwise occupied, I'll try to respond with the caveat that I
admit to having limited experience with the Jasper product line, but
perhaps considerable experience with alternatives that are similarly
designed.
A journey with Jasper begins with a report layout and configuration tool
named Jasper Studio, which is a pretty robust tool that is downloaded and
installed on users PCs. Jasper Studio enables users to navigate through a
series of step-by-step dialogs, which ultimately generates a report
configuration file that can be interpreted and run by a daemon named Jasper
Server.
The first step is for users to select a "template" from a number of
report-template categories. This initializes report layout options. The
next step is to pair the report template with a data model which is
typically derived from an SQL statement keyed by the user, or one that
results from an SQL view. The design process proceeds through a number of
steps that ultimately complete the report configuration file.
In regard to the question of whether this will work for you; that depends
on how closely your reports and documents align with the step-by-step
dialogs, which are geared for fairly simple query and view listings of
database rows, which may include groupings and summarizations. My gut feel
is that your organization has much more complex layout requirements paired
with much more complex data models, where the database listing paradigm
falls short. But I could be wrong.
Nathan.
midrange.com
