Introduction

1. After installing plug-in in NetBeans IDE you will observe a new category in Swing Palette: JasperReport Viewer
2. In a NetBeans Form (from where Jasper Reports (jrxml or jasper) must be invoked) created in an JPA project (meaning that persistence.xml must exists) you can add JasperRunnerButton.
3. The most important property is reportURL where you must provide the path and the name of the target Jasper report. The appropriate syntax must be relative to project package-structure and must be specified using normal Java conventions such as: /japp/view/reports/Report.jasper. Even a more java-source-like syntax is accepted, like japp.view.reports.Report.jasper.
4. Of course, the target report file must be included in NetBeans project and must be send in compilation (build/classes) or distribution path.
5. Other optional properties:
- reportParameters - to send parameters using a Map containing parameter name - value pairs;
- runSynchronous - to disable lunching button until preview window is up;
- databaseURL, databaseUser, databasePassword, databaseDriver if it is a JDBC only application (not a JPA context)
- sqlText - to send as parameter for JasperReport a SQL phrase like those used to initialize JDBC Prepared Statements and where the parameters marked with ? symbol will be replaced by the Map supplied with reportParameters property, Map that will include index-value pairs this time.
6. The plug-in installs the necessary jasper libraries (jars), so there is no need to add them separately.
7. The plug-in requires JDK 6 and it is based on JasperReports 1.3.3
8. The JasperReportViewer.jar contains JasperReportHelper class that is doing the whole integration work. This class contains three runJasper methods that can be called to lunch a Jasper report using database parameters or a JDBC connection or even a JDBC PreparedStatement.

What's new in this version

Updated to 2.0.3 version of JasperReports