NextReports (version 3.2) Formatting Conditions

A very useful feature for reports is the possibility to mark somehow a value.It may be outside a desired range or it may be equal / not-equal to a specified value. Think about a medical test report (if some index is less or greater than normal values).

To achieve this in NextReports, a new property called "formatting conditions" is used. By selecting a column or a function cell in the report layout, you could modify this property.

For example, we want to highlight in different colors the activity code inside a project time sheet. For every code we are interested in, we can choose a different foreground.

When we add a render condition, we can choose which property we want to modify at "render time" , like foreground, background, font, color. We select an operator, the value we want to compare with and the property value. The property value will overwrite the general cell property defined in the layout if the condition is met.

And the result is here :

Web Service to run reports

NextReports Designer uses a web service to publish / download reports to a NextReports server.

To integrate reports in a proprietary  application where we want to generate some reports with specific parameters from that application, we created a new report web service.

This will allow for a very simple integration with a NextReports server :

RunReportMetaData runReportMetaData = new RunReportMetaData();

runReportMetaData.setReportId(reportId);
runReportMetaData.setFormat(HTML_FORMAT);

Map parametersValues = new HashMap();
parametersValues.put("Id", 2);
runReportMetaData.setParametersValues(parametersValues);

try {
    String url = webService.runReport(runReportMetaData);
} catch (WebServiceException e) {           
    showError(e);
}

Table Widgets in NextReports Server

NextReports Engine has now support to export a report / chart to a table, a memory object with a header and data. This exporter is used on the NextReports Server to add a table widget inside the dashboard.

Widgets can be renamed through an editable label, near the collapse / expand button. Similar to charts, tables have settings (parmeters values), can be refreshed or deleted.

From server version 2.1widgets can be saved as excel. For a table widget this is obvious. For a chart widget, the excel will contain X column and all Y columns defined inside the chart.