Apex and JasperReports: printing reports

APEX is a great tool for web application development. It’s fast, and easy to learn, on top it’s highly flexible. That being said, APEX has no native method for printing reports from your application. Instead you can connect a print server to let you handle your report printing.

The reason that the APEX development team didn’t create a build in print server seems to be that it is beyond the focus of the APEX project. Besides, Oracle already has BI publisher as print server. Another reason could be that building a native print server would likely require the use of Java. That would be a problem with Oracle XE that does not support Java in the database. So the choice of supporting other print servers instead of building a native one makes sense. It does of course; raise the question what tool to use for printing reports?

Oracle has its own reporting tool: BI publisher. With the help of a browser interface or an IDE you can easily build documents and reports, schedule mailings, etc. The downside is that it’s not license free. Fortunately APEX is distributed with another print server: Apache FOP (Formatting Objects Processor). FOP is a print formatter that uses XSL –FO, which are XML like templates that determine the layout and output of the report. The data is delivered in a XML document. Unfortunately, building the XSL and XML files is a complex and time consuming process, which will likely result in high development costs.

An alternative reporting tool is JasperReports, an open source reporting engine by Jaspersoft. The print server takes data from virtually any data source and translates them into high quality, printable reports. You can easily build reports with an IDE of choice: iReport -a Netbeans-based designer, or Jaspersoft Studio –an Eclipse based designer. Best of all: it is cost free! That is, there is a very functional community edition that lets you build any type of printable report you can imagine. You call a report with an URL that contains your data source, and – if your report query requires so – the parameters to build your query. Basically in the same manner as APEX calls an application page (although the syntax is rather different).

The fact that it is easy to use and allows for rapid development, along with the fact that the print request is comparable with the way APEX transmits page calls, makes JasperReports the ideal reporting tool to incorporate in your APEX application. An added benefit is that the print server along with the IDE are cost free (community edition). In an upcoming blog I will go further into incorporating JasperReports into your APEX application and building a secure interface.

To get started with JasperReports, please visit the Jaspersoft website; there you can also download iReport or Jaspersoft Studio. To download JasperReports, go here. If you want additional information on JasperReports, iReport, or if you’re looking for installation instructions, you can look here.