Advantages of catalogs

The main advantage to catalogs is that they provide a way to organize related reports and make it easy for these reports to share objects, have a consistent look and feel, and can be moved to different systems. Catalogs also provide these additional benefits:

• Visual database - working off-line
  From a system that is offline from the database, you can still continue to develop the reports that will access it. This is because the architecture of your database (tables/views, queries, and parameters) is stored in the catalog.
• Sharing defined data fields and formulas among reports
  Multiple reports can use data fields and formulas that have already been defined and saved in the catalog.
• Reference table
  JReport provides a reference table that can keep track of all the objects used in all the reports in a catalog. In addition to helping you build well-designed reports, this feature makes object names changes easier to manage.
• Default values for objects
  You can set the default values for certain catalog objects. Once set, their values do not need to be individually set in the report after they have been inserted.