Recently I've been assigned a task of designing reports using the open source Pentaho, based on a document provided by the TAD- yes u Mahmoud- I managed to use the component JFree successfully. It's a piece of cake connecting to ur backend, either thru JNDI or JDBC connection strings. Pentaho supports JFree, Jasper and BIRT reports, u can easily embed in the action sequence file of Pentaho.
However I got disappointed from the primitive options in Pentaho report designer which outputs a JFree generated XML report, as a result I decided to check BIRT (Business Intelligece Reporting tool). BIRT is an open source, Eclipse-based reporting system. The designer is amazing, for me it was like Alice in wonder land :)
so here's my Pros and Cons in JFree Vs BIRT:
BIRT gives u a WYSIWYG view, which gives an ease of use
You can add event handlers for the report for example before rendering report u can add some
java and java script code for an entire row in a table.
A powerful feature to debug report, but I didn't check it actually but I know it's there :)
Easy to maintain dynamic parameters based on data source values
Easy to include style sheets, charts, images, labels...etc
You can add calculated fields thru the expression builder
The option for conditional format is great.
BIRT performs ajax pagination, what more can u ask for?!
JFree exports to many formats while BIRT export to CSV format, actually currently i'm facing an arabic export problem :s
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way to go sahar
well.. u r a senior.. i expected u'll get the most of it..
it is a bit frustrating when u work alone (u can't imagine how much i know it).. so feel free to interrupt me with pentaho problems and discoveries..
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