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Cheers Jasper Reports expert, I'm a bit new with Jasper Reports so thanks for any help. We are investigating the use of Jasper Reports Server as our main tool to offer our customers the reporting capabilities they need. We are a Java shop but would like our clients to mainly interface with JasperReports Server for reporting needs (as opposed to writing a custom app for this).

We have a requirement to display scientific data (signal trace data) that is contained in a BLOB field (it's some standard format but not well known). I've considered a couple of options:
1) Find some cool out of the box support for this (this seems unlikely)
2) Deploy a custom jar file and reference a method that produces a complete chart displayable via JR Server (It really seems like I should have come across a way to do this by now, but haven't seen it).
3) Deploy a custom jar file to jasper and reference a java method that makes the data understandable to JRServer and use the built in charting capability (We could write any java needed but I'm not sure how to integrate with JRServer).
4) Write a simple servlet to serve up the image we want in the chart (alas, something I understand how to do!).
Question: which of these are real options and have I considered the best options?

Thanks

Wayne.

Wayne
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2 Answers2

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  1. VERY unlikely

  2. could be possible but needs a lot of research. Have you considered using JFreeChart Customizer classes? You can manipulate the renderer, the dataset (values) and nearly everything else of the given chart.

  3. Do you want to define a new datasource? Or just use a function inside the report like: parsemydata($F{blob})? Both is possible.
    Put your .jar file into /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/jasperserver/WEB-INF/lib/ (path on a debian squeeze with tomcat6)
    if you want to use functions from a custom class in a report you have to import the class first, with: <import value="your.class"/>
    Creating a new datasource is a bit more complex, and subject of another question.

  4. something I don't know anything about.

robin.koch
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I would suggest to have a look at ReportServer (http://reportserver.datenwerke.net/). It has good JasperReports integration, so if you find an acceptable method with Jasper this path is open to you. However, I would expect that if you have scientific data then you might need some custom charts (and maybe even dynamic ones). What we usually do in this situation is to use ReportServer to preprocess the data (script reports or dynamic lists) and use a specialized javascript charting library such as d3 (http://d3js.org/) to do the actual plotting.

What format is your data in, and what kind of charts did you have in mind?

Arno Mittelbach
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