Dynamic Reporting using the ReportSpec API (work in progress)

March 02, 2007
Submitted by Mike D'Amour, Pentaho Team Developer

Introduction and Background

• growing need for dynamic reports (eg crosstab)
• reference to nic guzaldo techtips
• inline action-sequence based dynamic reporting
• can be done in Java code in an embedded solution

Fully Dynamic vs. Programmatic

• fully dynamic means the report will be generated without any knowledge of the data
• programmatic means our use of the ReportSpec API is targeted at a specific batch of data (typically a fixed number of columns)

Dynamic Sample

• include xaction XML along with detailed discussion

Programmatic Sample

• include xaction XML along with detailed discussion

Embedded Reporting

• assumption is that user already has jfreereport in an embedded environment
• example snippet of Java code that can be used to dynamically generate a report definition