JasperReportsIntegration 2.0.0 - Beta Test

Hi guys,

I am pleased to announce the beginning of the beta test for the upcoming release 2.0.0 of the JasperReportsIntegration kit.

I welcome you all to participate in the beta test, you might even have the chance to get some extra features in or at put your wish at least on the roadmap.

This release focuses a lot on ease of use, stability and support of different application servers. But there are interesting new features as well:

Support for JasperReports 4.7.0

I have included the latest libraries from JasperReports to stay up to date with the current JasperReports release.

Included Oracle JDBC connection pool

In addition to the JNDI configuration of the data sources you can now use a plain configuration file to use the Oracle JDBC connection pool directly. It is included in the J2EE application. Thus the configuration will be identical on all J2EE servers ... and it is really easy to use :). 

Support for the major application servers

I have already tested on Jetty, Tomcat and Weblogic. Here I will need your support to test against other J2EE servers as well!

Fine grained logging and better error messages

Iam using log4j as the logging framework now with nicely written logfiles and support for different log levels. Also, everything is checked, no more null pointer exceptions, you should always get a really precise error message. 

Reports can be deployed anywhere on the server

You can manipulate the search path for the report files using an environment variable on the operating system or a setting in the application server configuration (e.g. web.xml). This way you can easily upgrade the integration kit, your reports and the configuration files will not be removed by an undeploy/redeploy of the application. 

Storing files on the application server directly

Storing files on the application server directly (just as Oracle Reports did, destype=FILE). Developers from an Oracle Reports background will like this one. You can enable this feature and provide a filename on the server on which to save a copy of the generated report. 

Directly sending output to a network printer

Also, this is a feature well known from Oracle Reports. Just specify a printer (which is locally known to the application server) and send the output directly to it. You can specify the media (size or tray), the number of copies and whether the output shall be sorted (collate).

You can call the PrinterDiagnostics page to discover the locally installed printer and their settings: 

Major upgrade of the test application

The new version will check everything that is required and give specific suggestions on how to fix it. 

If everything is setup correctly, all tests will pass. 

If anything goes wrong, you will get detailed error messages and precise instructions on how to fix it: 

Quick Start

Personally, I love this one. Especially to get the beginners started I have included the Jetty server in the download. You can start the J2EE application just by clicking on a shell script, can it get any easier?

Even for myself it is nice to have the test report up and running in two minutes :) 

The documentation can be found here. To go to the download directly, click here. 

I have created another forum for the beta test, so please post all questions, issues, findings here: http://www.opal-consulting.de/forums/viewforum.php?f=10 .

Hope you enjoy it :). 

Cheers, 

~Dietmar.