The following are elements contained in business view.
Categories are the main tools for organizing data. They are components which correspond to particular collections of data in the data source. They are grouped in folders that are named to reflect information collections. A category can contain several subcategories.
Organizing data required by a user into multiple categories or multiple levels of categories is meaningful, and makes it easy to use. End users can use categories to find data elements they need to use without knowing the underlying table names although sometimes the table names are used as categories.
Group objects are view elements that are the basis for organizing data in a report. They present the availability and key performance of data, and characteristically return text data or dates, and answer the following question: who, when, what, where and which. A group object can be inserted wherever a field can be inserted, as a column or row in a crosstab, or as a group field or detail field in a table or as a category or series in a chart. They may be based on DBFields such as region and country or they could be based on formulas such as the year, quarter, or month portion of a date field.
Aggregation objects are numeric view elements that are calculated at runtime based on the group objects in the report. Aggregations can be used alone or calculated with other fields. An aggregation object can be inserted wherever summaries can be inserted. For example, aggregations can be inserted in the group header or footer panel of a table, as an aggregate field in a crosstab, or as the value in a chart. JReport calculates values based on the group level at which the aggregation object is inserted such as total sales, average order size and number of orders from a customer.
Detail objects provide additional information. It can be bound to a database field, group object, aggregation object or category/subcategory. Detail objects are used for displaying detailed field values such as address and phone number for a customer in a table. Detail objects cannot be used in crosstabs and charts and cannot be used for grouping in tables.