Adding Reporting Capabilities to Java Applications

We can easily add reporting capabilities to Java applications by taking advantage of the classes included in the JasperReports class library. JasperReports can be easily embedded into both client and server-side Java applications, simply by adding the required libraries to our CLASSPATH and calling the appropriate methods in the JasperReports API.

Setting Up Our Environment

The JasperReports project folder we have, contains the following files and directories:

To get up and running quickly, the files to be added to the CLASSPATH are jasperreports-2.0.3.jar which can be found under the dist subdirectory, and all the JAR files under the lib subdirectory.