what does a tool like Jasper Reports give me?

Question

Ok, So I have to generate very complex reports from my DB.
If I am to do it with SQL the query themselves will be complex, and I will have to do some more manipulation on the results later, code level.
How do libraries like Jasper Reports/ Crystal Reports and friends save me time when developing such reports?
What will they give me?

Answer 1

These tools may not necessarily save you that much time writing the SQL, but they will give you a nice clean presentation of the data for your customers.

Answer 2

When it comes to writing the query, they won't give you much. Some of the Business Intelligence tools out there (although none of the open source ones I know of) give you infrastructure for point and click queries. A developer still has to do the hard work of setting them up, especially for complex queries, to provide a view of the data that is simple enough for the user.

What these tools do give you is an engine to take care of a lot of the presentation issues, such as formatting, page breaks, converting to multiple formats (HTML, PDF, etc), running, storing and retrieving the reports and other things in that area.

Answer 3

What ever tool you are using to generate reports, you got to write your complex SQL or define the views out of your data to generate the reports. The benefit of using the tools is

• Can generate multiple type of report formats (PDF, EXCEL, TEXT..)
• Eliminates a lot of routine chores like setting date/time stamps, header formatting..
• Maintains consistency across multiple report pages which is generally a bit hard to acheive
• Creates a template layout which can be reused and some fancy functions like sub reports and easy type conversions in some cases..
• etc...

Answer 4

It's hard to say with the not so detailed info you provided, but I have 14 years experience with Crystal Reports and can tell you that it's very powerful. You can manipulate the resulting dataset in Crystal Reports in many ways. Crystal Report has a very decent internal program language to do this. And then you'll have subreports, which will save your day if it get hard.

I never found a report builder that can math Crystal Reports, especially looking at it's low price. If money isn't the problem then you can also look at List & Labels, www.combit.net.

Answer 5

One major thing Crystal Reports gives you is the ability to do Subreports--that is, multiple, related queries that return nested result sets. This can really simplify the individual queries your write. Take a look at http://vb.net-informations.com/crystal-report/vb.net_crystal_report_subreport.htm

Answer 6

If I am to do it with SQL the query themselves will be complex, and I will have to do some more manipulation on the results later, code level.

Jasper could be very effective in manipulating the data before/during generating the report. By design, every variable, parameter or field in JasperReports could be a Java expression, imagine the possibilities.

How do libraries like Jasper Reports/ Crystal Reports and friends save me time when developing such reports?

Both Jasper and Crystal give you the ability to extract the fields from the query, Jasper also gives you abilities like extracting fields from XML or JavaBeans. (i dont know about Crystal)

What will they give me?

Those two are very good tools for making reports, i have made very complicated reports on Jasper, so the tools themselves are very advanced, its how you will use them that counts.

Answer 7

As others have said, what these tools give you is an link between your data and how you want to display it - be that a listing, chart, cross tab (grid of summarized values) etc, with options for your own parameters, calculations and queries.

If you are embedding your reports in your application, I'd say your selection of a reporting platform gets down to what technology are you comfortable with. For Microsoft, look at Crystal. For Java, look at JasperReports and iReport.

JasperReports does have sub reports.

Sherman

Jaspersoft (company behind JasperReports)

Answer 8

If you mean complex as in the data and manipulation, then code-level systems like Jasper and Docmosis will let you manipulate the data in code as well as in the query. You can combine the best of SQL with the best of code algorithms to get your report data ready. This will save you time if maintaining simple SQL + simple code is better in your environment than maintaining complex SQL.