Lesson 5: Creating a table report

The Jinfonet Gourmet Java company receives orders from customers in different territories around the world, and by reviewing this shipping information the Shipping department can receive bids from various shipping vendors. You are assigned the task of creating a shipment information report. In the report, the shipment details, including order ID, order date, ship date, shipping cost, whether the payment has been received, and the shipping vendor, need to be reported for each territory.

The following prototype of the report has been given to you:

This report will be run online, so an interactive report will work well. Interactive reports allow the end user to change the view of the report. They can filter the data on the report or change the sort order, as well as search the report.

This lesson contains the following tasks:

Task 1: Create the report

Before taking this task, make sure you have enabled the Insert field name label with field option in the Options dialog as noted at the end of Lesson 3. Otherwise, the name labels will not be inserted together with the fields when you add fields to the table.

  1. From the JReport Designer toolbar, click the New Page Report button .
  2. In the New Page Report dialog, clear the text in the Report Title text box, select Table (Group Above) from the layout box, then click OK.

    Be sure that JinfonetGourmetJava.cat is specified as the current catalog because it is the catalog we use in this track. For information about specifying this catalog, see Task 1, Step 2 of Lesson 1.

  3. In the Data screen of the Table Wizard, check the New radio button.
  4. Expand the Queries node in Data Source 1, click <Add Query...>, enter ShipmentDetailsbyCustomer in the Input Query Name dialog and click OK.
  5. In the Query Editor, click Query > Add Table. In the Add Table dialog, add the tables Customers and Orders to the query, then click Done.

    The two tables are then joined together automatically on the Customers_Customer ID and CustomerID_FK1 columns.

  6. Check all the columns in the Orders table. For the Customers table, check the following columns: Customer Name, Customers_State, Customers_Country, Customers_Territory and Customers_Region.
  7. Click OK at the bottom of the Query Editor to create the query. Then click Next in the Table Wizard.
  8. In the Display screen, add the fields Orders_Order ID, Order Date, Ship Date, Ship Via, Payment Received and Shipping Cost to the table.

By default, the records in a table are displayed randomly; they are displayed in the order they are returned from the fetch operation. You can specify that JReport sort the records in a table, and also within the groups in table if any, according to your requirement. In this lesson, we will make the records in the table sorted by order ID ascendingly.

  1. Click the Sort Fields By button at the right bottom corner of the Display screen. In the Sort Fields By dialog, add the DBField Orders_Order ID as the sort by field, then click OK to return back to the table wizard.

  2. Click Next in the Table Wizard to display the Group screen.

Since the report is required to display shipment details of each customer in specific territory, we will add two groups to it: first group the report by territory and then by customer name.

  1. In the Group screen, add the DBFields Customers_Territory as the first group by field and Customer Name the second one.

  2. Switch to the Style screen and select to display the report in the Classic style vertically.
  3. Click Finish to create the report.
  4. Click the View tab to preview the report and it appears as follows:

The required report has been created, but it is cumbersome to locate the shipment details of specific territories. So our next task is to add web controls to the report so that the end user can easily filter the results of the report.

Task 2: Add a web control to the report

Web controls empower end users of interactive reports to easily modify the report results they are viewing, and are defined by a trigger event, such as click, and a resulting web action.

In this task, we add a Drop-down List web control to the PageHeader panel of the report. It will be used to filter the report records by territory.

  1. Click View > Page Header to display the PageHeader panel.
  2. In the Report Inspector, select the PageHeaderPanel node and change its Height property to 1.25.
  3. Click Insert > Web Controls > Drop-down List to insert a web control into the PageHeader panel.
  1. Right-click the web control and select Display Type from the shortcut menu.
  2. In the Display Type dialog, click the Value cell and then click in it to display the Insert Fields dialog.
  3. Select Customers_Territory in the Customers table in the DBField List box and click the Insert button to add it as value of the drop-down list.
  4. In the Web Behaviors box, click the Events cell and select Data Change from the drop-down list, then click in the Actions cell.

  5. In the Web Action List dialog, select the Filter action and click OK.
  6. In the Filter - Web Action Builder dialog, specify to apply the action to TableComp, click the Filter On cell and select CUSTOMERS_TERRITORY from the drop-down list, then click the Value cell and select MultiValueContainer. Click OK to apply the settings.

  7. Click OK in the Display Type dialog to confirm the settings.
  8. Resize the drop-down list horizontally to make sure the territory name can be displayed completely.

In this lesson, we will not explain the web actions and their parameters in detail. You can refer to Applying web actions in the Components chapter of the JReport Designer User's Guide for assistance.

By now, we have finished defining values of the web control. Next we will add a label ahead of it for identification, and a report title to the report.

Task 3: Add objects and edit their properties

  1. Drag and drop two Label objects from the Toolbox panel to the PageHeader panel. Resize them and edit their text as follows:

  2. Select the two labels and set their Bold property to true in the Report Inspector.
  3. Resize the Shipment Details by Customer label, set its Font Size property to 18 and Foreground property to Red.

  4. Select the Order Date and the Ship Date DBFields and set their Format property to M/d/yyyy.
  5. Resize the two group by fields, add two labels ahead of them and edit the text of the labels as "Territory:" for the first group by field and "Customer Name:" for the second.
  6. Select the four objects in the two GroupHeader panels, set their Foreground property to 0xcc0000.

  7. Double-click the Orders_Order ID label in the TableHeader panel and edit its text to Order ID.
  8. Select the Ship Via label and resize it to make sure no data get truncated. Do the same to the Payment Received label.

Next, we will apply a different background color to the GroupHeader panels to make them distinguished from the TableHeader panel and hide the second GroupFooter panel to improve the layout of the report.

  1. Select the two GroupHeader panels in the Report Inspector and set their Backgroud property to 0xf3f3f3.
  2. Right-click on the second GroupFooter panel header and select Hide from the shortcut menu to hide the panel.

  3. On the report tab bar, right-click the report tab and select Rename from the shortcut menu to rename the report tab as ShipmentDetails.
  4. Click File > Save to save the report as ShipmentDetailsbyCustomer.cls.
  5. Click the View tab to preview the report and it appears as follows:

    Note: If the report does not look correct, you can compare it to the final version of the report provided by JReport. To do so, you will need to save and close this catalog and then open the JinfonetGourmetJava.cat catalog file located at <install_root>\Demo\Reports\TutorialReports.

The web controls are powered by Page Report Studio and therefore cannot be previewed in JReport Designer. We can use the Preview as Page Report Result command of JReport Designer to preview this report, however, this command is enabled only if the option Server for Previewing Reports was specified when installing JReport Designer.

Click View > Preview As > Page Report Result. The report will then be opened in a web browser. Now we can select values from the drop-down list to dynamically change the report results. In the report below, we choose to view records in the Mexico territory.

Lesson 5 summary

In this lesson, we created a shipment details report in the table report layout. In the report, we used a table container to format the data, and a web control to dynamically change the report results.