Archive for June of 2008
Harnessing Hibernate review available
June 24, 2008
Actually it has been done for some time now but I forgot to post the link here. Feel free to comment as usually.
iReport 3 experiences
June 11, 2008
During last couple days I have been working with iReport 3.0.0. I was creating a multipage PDF report for a customer to review data from online forms. I have to say that iReport saved plenty of nerd sweat but it also caused some headache. I did not have the printed documentation (The Definitive Guide to iReport) so I ended up searching forums and other sites.
Getting started was pretty easy but I ran into my first problem when I tried to figure out how to display numerous key-value data pairs on a single page. Creating a subreport and passing the key value to it was the solution and luckily there was a screencast explaining it. So, soon my page was filled with values and the next dilemma was ready.
Creating a multipage report was a bit awkward because it required to have a subreport for each page. And each page was using a subreport already. The trick to get this working was to pass the subreport directory from root to all subreports. After this the report expanded over 8 pages and my creative colleague was ready to modify its layout. It was rather easy for him to start using iReport even he had no previous experience with it.
But he wasn't totally happy with iReport's responsiveness and it was definitely sluggish on his workstation. It turned out that there was something wrong with the new page I created by copying existing page's .jrxml file. This caused the report preview to hang without any errors and eventually he was running several stuck preview processes at the same time. This was solved by simply restarting iReport and creating that new page from scratch.
Meanwhile I was experimenting with other features of iReport and I decided to try out it with a data set which required pivoting. Each row in the database had key-value pair with grouping time stamp. The requirement was to create a table having those keys as a column headers. The database was a bit older Oracle and it did not support pivoting as well as newer versions. The solution was to use iReport's crosstab function which turned out to be quite handy.
It will be interesting to see how iReport will evolve in the future. I have the feeling that there is some demand to improve its multipage handling among some other annoyances. But even with its current status it turned out to be a valuable tool.
Getting started was pretty easy but I ran into my first problem when I tried to figure out how to display numerous key-value data pairs on a single page. Creating a subreport and passing the key value to it was the solution and luckily there was a screencast explaining it. So, soon my page was filled with values and the next dilemma was ready.
Creating a multipage report was a bit awkward because it required to have a subreport for each page. And each page was using a subreport already. The trick to get this working was to pass the subreport directory from root to all subreports. After this the report expanded over 8 pages and my creative colleague was ready to modify its layout. It was rather easy for him to start using iReport even he had no previous experience with it.
But he wasn't totally happy with iReport's responsiveness and it was definitely sluggish on his workstation. It turned out that there was something wrong with the new page I created by copying existing page's .jrxml file. This caused the report preview to hang without any errors and eventually he was running several stuck preview processes at the same time. This was solved by simply restarting iReport and creating that new page from scratch.
Meanwhile I was experimenting with other features of iReport and I decided to try out it with a data set which required pivoting. Each row in the database had key-value pair with grouping time stamp. The requirement was to create a table having those keys as a column headers. The database was a bit older Oracle and it did not support pivoting as well as newer versions. The solution was to use iReport's crosstab function which turned out to be quite handy.
It will be interesting to see how iReport will evolve in the future. I have the feeling that there is some demand to improve its multipage handling among some other annoyances. But even with its current status it turned out to be a valuable tool.
Harnessing Hibernate
June 05, 2008
I have been reading this relatively new book for couple weeks now and it seems to be a good material for Hibernate beginners. There will be a proper review but I will post it to Java User Group Scotland's site when the review is ready. But as an early comment I could recommend Harnessing Hibernate.