Jaspersoft Studio

Being a full rewrite of iReport Designer, available as an Eclipse plugin, as well as a standalone application, Jaspersoft Studio is a comprehensive and reliable piece of software especially designed for JasperReports and JasperReports Server.

It helps you to quickly create interesting and full-detailed layouts with embedded charts, images and crosstabs, to name a few, then publish your reports to PDF, XML, RTF, CSV, HTML or DOCX format.

Since it uses the Eclipse environment in order to organize all the necessary resources, you are able to create projects that contain styles, libraries and images needed for report development.

When you launch the program for the first time, you are required to set the workspace where all your projects and default settings will be saved. Once the directory has been selected, a new workbench window will then appear that offers one or more perspective. By default, you can work using the Java perspective, but you can switch between ‘CV Repository Exploring’, ‘Report Design’, ‘Team Synchronizing’ or ‘Resource’.

The ‘Project Explorer’ section, located in the left pane of the application, displays the current project along with its proper JAR files. Please note that these files are generated automatically and by deleting them you won’t be able to create layouts in a proper manner.

When it comes to creating a new Jasper report, you can navigate to the File menu and access the proper option. A new window will appear from where you can select the template you are interested in.

In case you want to connect to a specific SQL database, you are required to select the data adapter in order to define the layout of the report before connecting it to a data source - then let the query to explore and insert all the proper fields to the reports. You will notice that all the editors, views and tabs will display the corresponding data.

What’s more, Jaspersoft Studio is able to handle a wide variety of measure units including pixels, centimeters and inches, so each time you create a new report, you can set its margins flawless, according with your needs.

To wrap it up, Jaspersoft Studio comes packed with great features that help you to create various layouts containing charts, images, subreports, crosstabs and much more.