[jdom-interest] JDOM and Report Writing

[Peter Kelley]

We did a bit of object reporting for our current project. What we did
was use JasperReports (sf.net) and write a custom data source that used
the webwork (sf.net opensymphony) actions that we were using to produce
our web content as data. IMHO it wouldn't be too hard to write a
JasperReports DS that was a JDOM tree and used xpath and Jaxen
(http://www.jaxen.org/) to get the data. Of course you could go one step
further and implement the interfaces for Jaxen directly on your classes
and skip the JDOM part.

Probably not what you were looking for if you are writing your own
reporting tool but I think that JasperReports is a pretty good tool and
maybe you should consider it for your needs.

Peter Kelley

On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 09:33, Jeff Martin wrote:
> I'm new to XML and JDOM, but all I can say is thank god this stuff 
> exists. I was drowning in Sun's APIs and documentation, but with JDOM I 
> was able to write code to save an Object Graph Description from any set 
> of objects to XML in just a few hours. The code is here: 
> http://reportmill.com/examples/RMSaveXML.java (if anyone has any hints 
> about handling circular references, let me know, I'm about to embark on 
> an id based referencing scheme).
> 
> My product, ReportMill, generates reports directly from Java objects, 
> but it needs an object graph description to do template design. The 
> next release is going to use XML for this (instead of a dataset file 
> with serialized Java objects, for the current version). I thought this 
> was going to be awesome, running reports from any XML datasource, but 
> now I'm starting to think things will only work for XML files that 
> follow specific supported conventions that I define (things like 
> providing data types, object references, etc.). I'm sure many on this 
> list know more than me - if you want to influence a nice product, 
> please send advice if I'm missing the bigger picture!
> 
> jeff martin
> 214.513.1636
> http://reportmill.com
> 
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