Question

Is there any way to make an ireport export to excel as Microsoft ReportViewer does?

I’ve always used Microsoft ReportViewer and I found an enormous difference between them, I like the way it work but I have to do this program in java and jasperreports is the best report engine Ive found.

Actually I’ve found that I can export to excel from java manually using code and using the Apache POI library, but I have to basically draw in code how I want the spreadsheet to be made.

Is there anything that I can do about it?, or is there any other report engine that I’m missing? or maybe any configuration parameter?

please help! and sorry about my english

Thanks in advance 🙂

PS: By the way its a desktop application and it only needs to work in windows

Answer 1

You can use at least two Java frameworks for working with JasperReports:
JasperReports API and DynamicJasper API.

You can find a lot of samples in Jasper Reports distribution package (look in %jasperreports%\demo\samples folder).

The sample of Java code for exporting report to MS Excel format using JasperReports API:

Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(url, login, pswd);

Map<String, Object> params = new HashMap<String, Object>();
JasperReport jasperReport = JasperCompileManager.compileReport(reportJRXMLFile);
JasperPrint jasperPrint = JasperFillManager.fillReport(jasperReport, params, connection);

JasperExportManager.exportReportToPdfFile(jasperPrint, outputFile);

The another variant to build report in Excel format is to use JasperServer – ready for use web-application for building reports. It has many other exporters (pdf, docx, txt, xml, etc.).

The iReport is NetBeans based GUI designer for constructing report’s templates (jrxml files).
The Jaspersoft Studio is similar designer based on Eclipse.