Passing java query result to fields / UCanAccess Compatibility

Question

I have really low knowledge on Java and JasperReports, barely used those to play around, nothing too serious. A friend of mine has been trying to get someone to develop him an application that will generate PDFs with information from an access database for each of his clients, however, after 6 months and 7 developers who ditched him, he has found none, so he asked me if I could help him to which I said I'd give it a try.

What I have been able to do so far:

So far I've managed to successfully (Everything has been done separately, I have like 8 projects in total so far):

• Use Jaspersoft Studio/iReport to create a single PDF with the required client information on each sheet.
• Create a separate JasperReports project with a input field to get a pdf with a single client information.
• Create a Java App with a JFrame to launch the report generation.
• Create a Java App to connect to the access database through ucanaccess and validate the search criteria

Questions:

Now, after a few days on Google up and down I havnt managed to successfully achieve everything that I'd like to achieve, and I'd love if someone could either point me into good noob-proof guides or (if willing) provide a noob-proof answer so I can continue to move on.

• Create a Java App where you can choose to generate all client's report or a single report for a specified client (I am assuming this isn't too complicated since it'd just be a matter to embed both Jasper reports into the java app), however I'd need to pass the input value into jasper report field to generate a single report (Not sure if this one was clear enough), and run the query for the data-set based on that field's value.

• Ideally though not highly needed, pass yet another variable as a field to set a date range.

• Since this is being done on a MS Access Database -*.accdb- (Don't blame me, I've been telling him to move to MySQL/SQL for quite a while now), I'd love to know if its possible to make JasperReports do a query based on a UCanAccess JDBC connection (Tried a few options, none worked).

• Finally, I need to generate in the report a date range (Something like: "Between 1/Jan/2014 and 1/Feb/2014")

I feel like I've made a decent amount of progress so far, but since I am no pro on either JasperReports nor Java, I am getting stuck in a point where more knowledge is required to create a more decent and practical piece of software and I'd love if someone could point me into a better direction (Either if something is impossible or just a few links to help me get thru)

Answer 1

-Remeber to add ucanaccess jar and all dependencies jars in the Driver Classpath, while creating the Data Adapter

-You have to set Showschema=true: e.g.

jdbc:ucanaccess://c:/db/database.accdb;Showschema=true

In this way Jasper Studio will be able to navigate the metadata of your database, and you'll find your tables under the PUBLIC schema. Then you'll be able to create your reports as usual.