best way to display reports in netbeans gui

[Paul Agola]

0
down vote favorite i have menu item (NetBeans) that when pressed needs to generate a report on a linux machine. Do you have any idea on what would be th ebest way to display the form should i

Use iReport and Jasper Reports

Display the information in some sort of jdialogue form that pops up once the menu item is selected.

The way i produce the report might be insufficient. I use a c-shell script to read the call a sql script to read the information from the database and then dump it into a txt file. I want to read this text file and produce an offical report either using ireport or on a jdialue form. From reviewing ireport it seems like i dont have to use this method. I can run the sql script directly from ireport and generate the rpeort? problem is i am on a linux machine and im not sure ireports will work well plus this will be a long term effort to build a desktop gui and im wondering if this is the right apporach . Does iReport have reliable support and will it work with the latest netbeans releasde? anyone with experience may answer

[Paul Agola]

does anyone have any recent tutorials on jasper repoprts and ireport for netbeans 7.1.2?

[Ranganathan Kaliyur Mannar]

First of all, you have to understand a bit about JasperReports and iReport. JasperReports is a reporting engine - you design your reports in the form of an xml, but has an extension of .jrxml. JasperReports provides Java api calls which will read this file and generate a report in the form of html/pdf/image. iReport is a designer with which you can desgin .jrxml files by dragging/dropping stuff and basically a WYSIWYG editor for Jasper (jrxml files).
This link from the Jasper home page shows you how to generate a pdf output from a Jasper report in a normal Java app. A quick google search for Jasper & Swing brings up many examples like this.
As Java runs in Linux, you can develop this easily.

And, as you can see, this has nothing to do with NetBeans.