JasperReports Interview Questions and Answers

Jaspersoft is an open source software vendor focused on business intelligence, including data visualization, reporting, and analytics. Jaspersoft is one of the most flexible, cost-effective, and widely-deployed business intelligence software in the world, enabling better decision making through highly interactive Web-based reports, dashboards, and analysis. Jaspersoft Business Intelligence (BI) Suite Enterprise Edition is a strong competitor in the open source BI market, with its main rivals being Actuate BIRT, SpagoBI, and Pentaho Enterprise.

Or Jaspersoft is a Java-based open source BI platform, developed by TIBCO. The product has been around for several years and is strong in the field of visualization and the exploration of data. The product Jaspersoft consists of five different modules: Report Server, Studio, OLAP, Dashboard Designer and Analysis.

Different categories of Jaspersoft:

Jaspersoft reporting: It takes information from one or more data sources and presents it in an easy-to-read format so business users can stay informed and make better decisions.

Jaspersoft dashboard: It combines data and graphical indicators to deliver at-a-glance summaries of information for users to view the state of their business and quickly respond.

Jaspersoft data analysis: It is used to model, manipulate, and visualize data using OLAP or in-memory analysis in order to identify issues, spot trends, and make better decisions quickly.

Jaspersoft data integration: It extracts, transforms, and loads (ETL) data from different sources into a data warehouse or data mart for reporting and analysis purposes.

Jaspersoft BI Platform: It provides the centralized services required to manage the complete BI suite, enabling you to process, organize, secure and access reports, dashboards, and analysis views.

Jaspersoft BI Platform:

• Jasper Reports Library: Reporting engine
• Jaspersoft studio: It is use Visual report design environment
• Jasperreport server: Ad Hoc reports dashboard, in memory analysis server
•  Jaspersoft OLAP: It is powerful OLAP data analysis
• Jaspersoft ETL: It is high performance data integration

Features of Jaspersoft:

•  Reporting & dashboard
• Building Reports
•  Ad hoc report designer
• Interactive report workbooks
•  Data integration and Data analytics and Multi-dimensional analytics
•  Business Intelligence
•  Data virtualization
•  OLAP Server Analysis and Server repository
• Pluggable custom visualizations and Interactive heat map visualizations
• Metadata layer
•  Audit logging and ODS
•  Embeddable dashboards
•  In-memory analysis engines
•  Multi-tenancy
• Secured Data Access and Auditing
•  Sandbox / Test Environments
•  Connectors and ELT support
•  Mobile apps for iPhone and Android devices

•  In Jaspersoft, create report layouts containing charts, sub-reports, cross-tabs and more with the Pixel Perfect Report Designer.
• Jaspersoft is Java-based reporting library compiles and renders pixel-perfect documents using data from any data source.
• Jaspersoft is sort, filter, & format column values & headers against your report snapshot review with Jaspersoft’s browser-based report viewer.
• Jaspersoft, Store user profiles, reports, dashboards, analytic views and more with Jaspersoft’s centralized server repository.
• In Jaspersoft, monitor and manage the running and the distribution of reports with Jaspersoft’s advanced scheduler.

A report is a meaningful, well-defined, and summarized presentation of information. Usually, the routine activities are automated and data summarized into a decision-supporting “Reports”. Reports represent usual messy data into charts, graphs, and other forms of graphical representations.

Jasper Assistant is a visual report designer for JasperReports that is developed and distributed as an Eclipse plug-in. Its main goal is to help you create JasperReports report definition files through an intuitive and professional graphical user interface. Jasper Assistant is your door to the best open-source reporting engine available.

iReport is a program that helps users and developers that use JasperReports library to visually design reports. IReport is the free, open source report designer for JasperReports and JasperReports Server. Create very sophisticated layouts containing charts, images, sub reports, crosstabs and much more. Access your data through JDBC, Table Models, JavaBeans, XML, Hibernate, CSV, and custom sources. Then publish your reports as PDF, RTF, XML, XLS, CSV, HTML, XHTML, text, DOCX, or OpenOffice

JasperReports is a popular open-source reporting engine whose main purpose is to help creating page oriented, ready to print documents in a simple and flexible manner. JasperReports is a pure Java library and not a standalone application. It cannot run on its own, hence it needs to be embedded into another client or server-side Java application. As it is Java based, it can be run on any platform that supports Java (JDK 1.3 and above). All the JasperReport’s functionalities are gathered in a single JAR file, jasperreports-x.x.x.jar. JasperReports has the ability to deliver rich content in various formats such as PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV, XML files, or directly on the screen or printer.
It is distributed under two licenses, an Apache-style license and the LGPL license. Due to its flexible licensing, JasperReports is the perfect candidate to complete the reporting features for any commercial or open-source application.

Features of JasperReports:

• JasperReports has a flexible report layout.
• It can present data either textually or graphically.
• It allows developers to supply data in multiple ways.
• It can accept data from the multiple data sources.
• It can generate watermarks (A watermark is like a secondary image that is laid over the primary image).
• It can generate sub reports.
• It can generate watermarks.
• JasperReports is capable of exporting reports in a variety of formats.

JasperReports Server is a stand-alone and embeddable reporting server, enabling delivery of mission critical information on a real-time or scheduled basis to the web, to the printer, or to a variety of file formats. Build a report in iReport and then deploy it to JasperReports Server. The report can then be executed, exported to a desired output, or scheduled to execute at a later date.

The Jaspersoft’s customers come mainly from the ISV sector. But basically the companies that creates their own application. So a very wide range of organizations is there, even from the public sector.
Creating Dashboards and Reports is basically what customers do with Jaspersoft software. Those are static reports or interactive HTML5 charts. The reports and dashboards can be accessed from any mobile device, which provides a neat overview. You also have the option to get a deep analytical view.

• Aggregation of large volumes of data form various data sources;
• Scaling a BI solution to include data warehouses and data marts;
• Boosting of performance by off-loading query and analysis form systems.
• JasperETL provides an impressive set of capabilities to perform any data integration task. It extracts and transforms data from multiple systems with both consistency and accuracy, and loads it into optimized store.

There are several ways to add reporting capabilities to an application. For many web developers, to create a report just means to create a web page, which produces good results on screen but poor results when printed to paper. And to create a report in PDF means write more code tons of code, making the reports hard to maintain and long to write. When working with other technologies the problem does not change very much.
For example, Java provides an extensive API for printing, but there is still a lot of work to write specific code for each document format. The answer to this problem is to use a reporting library. JasperReports Library is the world’s most popular open source Java reporting library, and iReport Designer is a visual report designer for JasperReports. The library is a report engine that can be integrated in your open or commercial application to generate the reports designed with iReport Designer, display them on screen or export them in a final format like PDF, OpenOffice, DOCX and many others.
Alternatively, you can stream the result through a web application or send the final document directly to a printer. JasperReports is in some way the core of iReport Designer. JasperReports is extremely easy to integrate in an Java application, but if you need an environment to use the reports without having to write a custom application, you may consider using

User must ensure that the command line does not have any hash at the beginning of the line after it is updated. Because in such case it would no more be command line but would become comment only.

The documentation of iReport should be carried out by the user and not with some readymade packages that are mostly not fruitful for the purpose.

Scriptlets are the bridges that get the Java Code in iReport. iReport.scriptlet is a Java class that extends JRDefaultScriptlet where one can write user defined functions that can later be accessed easily in the report.

It is not necessary installing JasperReport in the system. Instead searching the system and setting the java.exe and set it to JAVA_HOMW would take care of the problem.

Scriptlets are the bridges that get the Java Code in iReport. iReport.scriptlet is a Java class that extends JRDefaultScriptlet where one can write user defined functions that can later be accessed easily in the report.

The JRXML templates (or JRXML files) in JasperReport are standard XML files, having an extension of .jrxml. All the JRXML files contain tag <jasperReport>, as root element. This in turn contains many sub-elements (all of these are optional). JasperReport framework can handle different kinds of data sources. In this tutorial, we shall show how to generate a basic report, just by passing a collection of Java data object (using Java beans), to the JasperReport Engine. The final report shall display a list of people with the categories including their names and countries.

When the jdkhome is set specifically for the iReport, opening a command line and going to the bin directory within the listed directories in the setting for executing the command java-version would help identifying the java version

The config file is available in the etc folder where the jdkhome has been set. The path that is to be given there is the jdk path and not jre path. Installation of jdk is essential for the purpose.

Basically iReport is the report designer and JasperReport is the reporting engine.

It is the iReport home page where user can get all information about the application and its uses.

Report filling process helps reporting tool to achieve this by manipulating sets of data.The main inputs required for report-filling process are −
Report Template: It is actual JasperReport file.
Report Parameters: These are basically named values that are passed at the report filling time to the engine.
Data Source: We can fill a Jasper file from a range of data sources like an SQL query, an XML file, a csv file, an HQL (Hibernate Query Language) query, a collection of Java Beans, etc.

iReport supports all JDBC compliant databases and also all kinds of JRData Source. It also supports sub reports as well as templates.

A few simple steps help to run the user defined functions. The first step is to go to Tools-options- claspath tab –ADD Jar- choose Jar file. In iReport the Scriptlet node in Report Inspector chooses the property named ‘Scriplet Class’. Keying in the location of the user defined function would help
What if the user cannot find java.exe or (null)jrebinjava.exe nor (null) binjava.exe while trying to generate ireport?
It is not necessary installing JasperReport in the system. Instead searching the system and setting the java.exe and set it to JAVA_HOMW would take care of the problem.

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Other user defined functions in iReport are $P {REPORT SCRIPTLET}.userDefinedfun ($F{field}). These functions give fluidity to Java from the Jasper to Java code.

Crosstab (cross-tabulation) reports are the reports containing tables that arrange data across rows and columns in a tabular form. Crosstab object is used for inserting a crosstab report within the main report. Crosstabs can be used with any level of data (nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio), and usually display the summarized data, contained in the report variables, in the form of a dynamic table. Variables are used to display aggregate data such as sums, counts, average values.