CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javajasper-reportsdocumentreport
Chad
Chad

Reputation: 778

JasperReports as a generic document generation tool

I need some input if this is possible.

I guess most of you who have used JasperReports use it to - obviously - generate reports.

My question is, can you use it to generate generic documents? Ergo, documents that AREN'T reports. Say, for example, an automated letter of authority with fields you can just populate at run time. Or a company form that is filled up by your app then generates a pdf using JasperReports.

The only other solution that came up was iText, which I believe is far more capable of achieving the desired output.

Any inputs would be appreciated. Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1967

Answers (3)

David Thielen
David Thielen

Reputation: 32926

With iText you can do anything. But it is a programming API and so you either have to create your own design tool or construct the reports in code. For something simple or that will rarely change, it works well.

If you want a full-blown docgen solution, you need a product like Document Science, Thunderhead, or Windward Docgen (disclaimer, I'm the CTO at Windward). The beauty of these solutions is you design templates (in the case of Windward you design in Word) that are then passed to the system so it does not require programming to create/revise a document. And they output to pretty much any format.

Upvotes: 1

Costis Aivalis
Costis Aivalis

Reputation: 13728

I do all kinds of elaborate reports with iReport. It is an amazing designer for JasperReports. It allows to drag and drop components and connect to your DB or JavaBean Datasources with wizards. A very mature application that gives you all sorts of report exporting capabilities.

Upvotes: 2

Dave Newton
Dave Newton

Reputation: 160191

You could, but I wouldn't--IMO you're better off using raw iText, or one of the dynamic languge PDF generators. IIRC iText can fill in PDF forms, too, so if you have someone else creating the PDFs, they can just be populated via iText.

OTOH, if they're relatively simple, it probably doesn't matter very much--you can pass non-tabular data to JR, I'm just not sure it's any easier that way.

Upvotes: 2

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