Tutorial iReports

In this tutorial, we will cover the use of creating a document in iReports and integrating it with opentaps. Various techniques are covered to assist in creating a report that can be served as PDF, Excel and other formats. Also covered is how to allow users to enter date ranges, product IDs and other dynamic parameters to constrain the report.

There is a wizard to help in creating a report, but it hides important details about the anatomy of a report. Therefore, we will be covering report creation from scratch. First, create a new report using File -> New Document. You should get a blank page and some information in the Document Structure window on the left.

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By default there are several sections on the page which are faintly labeled as title, pageHeader, columnHeader, detail, columnFooter, lastPageFooter and summary. These are called bands and they have special behavior with regards to how they print the contents on paginated formats such as PDF.

As you might have guessed, bands such as title, pageHeader, and footer are repeated every page. This is a good place for things that don't change much on a page by page basis, such as the title and page numbers. Usage of lastPageFooter and summary are beyond the scope of this tutorial. For now we can hide the bands we are not going to work with by dragging on the borders and reducing the band height to 0. Alternatively, you can right click on a band and select Band Properties and reduce the size of the bands to 0 by hand.dfF