FlexReport

Printing is a major feature in RIA, one Flash never seemed to cover well. Flash’s printing capabilities are at the very least rudimentary mainly because Flash was always target at designers. And Flex inherited that flaw. Adobe seems to have forgotten that the needs in web design are quite different from those at organizations. Organizations still need paper!

There are many issues concerning printing in Flex:

1. Report layout: in order to print a page in Flex you need to create a container and add it to a FlexPrintJob. Not a big issue when working with static content. But when creating dynamic reports where you don’t know how many pages you’ll have this process can quickly become a nightmare.

2. Multi-page content: The only component specifically designed for printing is PrintDataGrid. There’s no support for text or images.

3. Print preview: as I said before organizations need printing. But a thing they don’t need is wasting paper. There’s no way to make a print-preview with PrintJob. And no one likes printing 100 pages of a table, just to realize they are printing the wrong data.

FlexReport is a client-side report generation component. It allows you to easily generate, preview and print reports based in mxml/as3 templates.

There are still a few issues remaining but it’s ready to be used on non critical applications. You can see a live demo and source here.

I decided to make this project public in order to get some help improving FlexReport. I’m really looking forward for your feature requests, bug reports and code improvements.

Soon I’ll post a tutorial on creating templates, but the sources on the demo should be enough to get you started.

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Published:: 01.14.08 / 12pm

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Intoxopox 01.22.08 / 2pm

Having a bit of trouble running this in Flex 3. Starts out fine, but if you change pages and go back, the page isn’t there. I’m searching through everything now, but if you have a suspicion, please let me know.

Frederico Garcia 01.22.08 / 2pm

If you use next/previous pages disappear? I’ll see if I can reproduce the issue on FB3. You can take a look at Document.as, since it’s where the pages are created and stored.

Intoxopox 01.22.08 / 3pm

It seems that returning to page previously viewed is causing the bitmapData to go null. Not sure why yet. Still tracking it down.

joe 01.22.08 / 7pm

having the same issue…also, can you pass html tables or a datagrid?

Frederico Garcia 01.22.08 / 8pm

I’ll try to solve the issue with FB3 as soon as possible. To print grids use PrintDatagrid (similar to PrintTextArea).

Intoxopox 01.22.08 / 11pm

I’ve solved it not working in Flex 3. Works a treat now. I also optimized a few things. Not much, but every little bit counts. Shoot me an email and I’ll pack it up and send it to you tomorrow around my lunch time. I’d love to lend you a hand with this thing as it evolves, if you’re open to that.

MadeInFlex » Blog Archive » FlexReport 01.25.08 / 5pm

[…] leer más al respecto aquí. El código del proyecto está aquí y puedes colaborar para mejorarlo. […]

Charly Clairmont 01.31.08 / 5pm

Hi !

I don’t test your project. But I want to inform you about a project whose name is Jasper4Flex. It’s a new export engine for the JasperReports libraries that can export a report for a flex application.

I just want to know what are the big deferences between our vision and Jasper4Flex ?

for more information :
http://jasperforge.org/jaspersoft/opensource/business_intelligence/jasperreports/

Cheers

Paul Sanderson 01.31.08 / 5pm

Hi have started a site that you could be interested in using to share and promote your work. Its http://www.wscoop.com it is basically a digg styled site solely dedicated to quality web design and development.

Have a look see what you think, if you could some post links/articles that would be absolutely fantastic.

Thanks Paul

Joe 02.01.08 / 10am

When I try to use a PrintDataGrid, it’s giving me: “The supplied DisplayObject must be a child of the caller.” Any way you could post an example of printing to a PrintDataGrid using FlexReport?

Thanks!

Vinny Carpenter’s blog - » Daily del.icio.us for February 2nd through February 3rd 02.03.08 / 10pm

[…] kemelyon » FlexReport - FlexReport is a client-side report generation component. It allows you to easily generate, preview and print reports based in mxml/as3 templates. […]

Jesper 02.20.08 / 7am

I’ve done some experiments with the FlexReport. It’s very promising except I can’t get the PDF-export to work for anything else than the current chosen page in the preview. Though the number of pages is correct (but it repeats the same page). Is this a known bug?
Thanks /Jesper

Aaron Leavitt 02.27.08 / 6pm

I see a lot of potential in this product. I’ve played with it in an application I’m currently working on, but I’m having an issue. In both the example, and my usage I’m getting a blank page following every page. I’ve tried adjusting the report width and height to what printJob reports for my printer, but it hasn’t helped. Any thoughts?

Aaron Leavitt 02.28.08 / 4pm

Got it sorted. The guestimate values for the document template values weren’t matching what our printer actually wanted. Added the following values to doPrint in the Document class after the printJob is started.

template.height = printJob.pageHeight;
template.width = printJob.pageWidth;

The print preview is now only an estimate, but printing works correctly every time.

Frederico Garcia 02.28.08 / 7pm

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the bug report and fix. This issue is related to Flash printing API and can’t figure out a way to address it right. I don’t understand why can’t we set the page width/height from as3, it wouldn’t present a security risk.

I’m hoping printing capabilities in Flash get improved. In the meanwhile i’ll add your fix to the codebase.

Chayan 03.10.08 / 3pm

This doesn’t work. Flex 3 produces error “1172 Definition… could not be found.” The flex 3 auto-populates when you type “org.alivepdf.saving.Method;”; however, once you try to compile, error 1172 creeps up. Obviously the source ZIP doesn’t has AlivePDF in the root “org”, and it would make sense to move it into the org folder… but I when I do I still receive the error.

Frederico Garcia 03.10.08 / 4pm

Hi Chayan,

You should checkout the latest version from svn on googlecode. The version currently available as zip was released before the final version of FB3 and as such was only tested with FB2.

If you want to use the old version you just need to add Alive.swc to your project’s library path.

Chayan 03.11.08 / 3pm

Thanks Frederico!

Deepak 05.29.08 / 4am

Can anybody tell me how to export report in PDF format in flex3

KKK 06.10.08 / 11pm

I want to control my printing Doc Size

How can I control?

Preet 06.24.08 / 1am

I have to do very complex printing in my flex project. so after struggling a lot with flexprintjob I switched to FlexReport.
Its solved my problem 80%. the rest 20% has to do with PrintDatagrid. when i am using PrintDataGrid the rendering is not correct. Do you have an example of how do we use PrintDataGrid in FlexReport.

Raul 06.24.08 / 12pm

I’m trying to find the download link but I can’t seem to find it … am I missing something?

Brian 06.25.08 / 4pm

Has anyone been able to print a multi-page textarea with a header and footer on each page?

Yann 06.26.08 / 9am

Hi,

Many thanks for your fantastic work. It was realy needed to complete the flex toolbox.

I checkouted the last version of flexreport but is there an associated documentation ?

Nobody 07.09.08 / 4pm

Why is the swc so big? Will this cause our projects to grow by almost 1 mb? The swc is over 800k. Cairngorm is a few k - ?

Nobody 07.09.08 / 5pm

wtf? What is idmedia.as3commons and all this other shit it depends on? Is this supposed to be overriding the default Flex SDK classes or something???? No thanks!

Take that HashMap crap out and just use an Object or Dictionary, dump that stupid library.

I dunno what’s going on yet but something’s kinda screwy with adding this swc to a project. Is this not FB2 compatible or something? hm

Frederico Garcia 07.10.08 / 4am

Hi “Nobody”,

As you may have noticed this is a FREE and OPEN SOURCE project. No one forces you to use it, let alone like it. If there’s stuff you believe that could be improved in FlexReport you can always do that changes by yourself and send them to me. Your contribution is more than welcomed and all credits will be given.

Hope to ear from you soon…

Nobody 07.10.08 / 5pm

hehe

j/k I was just messin with ya to see if you’re still active on this. I was able to resolve the issues so far after taking some time.

Hello 07.11.08 / 10am

I’ve gotten this partially working but when I use PaperFormat.LETTER it crashes in Page.mxml:90 - End of File encountered. The byte array wasn’t big enough to fill the bitmap?

Kumar Shah 07.11.08 / 1pm

Thanks

Bogdan Paulon 07.23.08 / 2am

Hi
is there a way to insert a page break into the body of the report. I have a PrintDataGrid that has to be the only component on the page.

Paul 08.07.08 / 5pm

HELLO - You need to change the height and width in the report tag of template to match the page size for LETTER as found in PaperFormat.as (792, 1224)

But I need to insert a page break into my report as well.

Paul

I have an odd problem. When I change to PaperFormat.LETTER the main part of the previewer displays smeared lines that are unreadable. When I change it to A4 everything works great. When I print it looks good as well.

If I send to PDF I get the same results, everything is smeared. I am running the latest SVN as of today.

Any Ideas?

Eran 08.08.08 / 2pm

first, great library.

I have few questions:
1. Does the library support multi languages ?
my application, needs to support RTL languages also.
is it possible ?
2. Can i configure the application not to show specific controls ?
for example, not to show the button which save it as PDF file.

thanks,
Eran.

Paul 08.15.08 / 9pm

I screwed up above when I specified (792, 1224) which caused my problem mentioned in the subsequent post. Letter is [612, 792]. Sorry for the confusion.

I am still looking for a method to insert page breaks into the data stream feeding the report however.

toni 09.03.08 / 1pm

I saw your FlexReport classes. I have one problem in flex. I want to print image wich source I get from XML file. I know that you can print Embeded images, but I need to attach logo in AIR application after install and then print it in reports.

Can you help me.

Thanks,
Toni

Paul Morris 10.24.08 / 7am

Hi Anyone,

Is there a commercial version of FlexReport available?

We are quite happy to pay for it. OR is there anyone out there with the time to help us out in using FlexReport, again we are more than happy to pay for any assistance we receive.

Mohammad 11.17.08 / 9am

Hi Frederico Garcia
Thanks for this great job
but I have problem ..
I downloaded the source files and I ran the application and it worked ok. but When I add more than one Printdatagrid to the body, some contents of the datagrids are repeated ..

Do u have any idea about this bug..
Many thanks in advance

Mohammad 11.18.08 / 4am

Hi Frederico Garcia
Is this blog still active?
I do need some help?!

Hello 12.04.08 / 2pm

Looks like the project was abandoned. Flash printing sucks! That’s probably why.

Dimi 12.11.08 / 9am

The project is interesting, thought the number of bugs is still huge :(. Correct something - get something new to work around. In my case first it was cropping each page a bit on A4R page. Even in example it makes additional page between each pages duing print (looks like something doesn’t fit on the page, even though it could be one line of text ). Anyway - the try was good, but still requires really lots of work to be finalized.

LC 02.21.09 / 4pm

Hi Frederico, thanks for taking the time to make this available.

Had some trouble recently getting onto your demo sit ebut it all appears ok at the moment.

My main issue has been getting a printable textarea, which Flexreport seems to address.

Add to that the fact that the PrintDataGrid takes its rowheight from the first row in a table and basic Flex printing is utterly useless.

I’m hoping I can get Flexreport up and running with our current project, and that you’re still active on the project. Great opensource effort.

Regards,

Manik 03.17.09 / 7am

I am getting below error when tried to print a datagrid in report -

Error: Error #2030: End of file was encountered.
at flash.display::BitmapData/setPixels()
at org.print::Page/render()

Manik 03.18.09 / 5am

Hi, I resolved the peoblem :).
I dont know if it is a bug in FlashReport or in Flex. When i give a width=400 and height=300 to the object of FlashReport i got below error -
Error: Error #2030: End of file was encountered.
at flash.display::BitmapData/setPixels()
at org.print::Page/render()

I read couple of posts and JIRA for Flex. somewhere i read that it might be because the objects that are converting into Bitmap whose sizes are not in multiple of 8.

When i change my object declaration to width=”100%” and height=”100%”, i am successfully able to get it worked.

Manik 04.02.09 / 1am

I am again getting the same problem when i change the PaperFormat to A3 or legal. Even in the demo application.

Can anybody please tell me how i can change the paper format in preview?

Manik 04.16.09 / 5am

Is this still alive???????????

Raquel 05.01.09 / 11pm

Hi, someone could print image not embed on flex report? Someone can help me?

Greg 05.04.09 / 5pm

Downloaded latest version from google and trying to run FlexReportDemo. Getting errors. “Could not resolve to a component implementation”. How can I resolve?

tony 06.04.09 / 3pm

Where is the link you used to download this from google? Is the source downloadable as a single file? The only thing I found in google code was each separate mxml file which I can download if i have to one at a time but would like the whole bundle.

Dave 06.19.09 / 3am

Big thanks to Aaron Leavitt for solving the extra blank page issue!
Great flex project - a life saver!
Thanks.

Ole 06.23.09 / 3pm

To Dave and/or Aaron:
Where did you put
template.height = printJob.pageHeight;
template.width = printJob.pageWidth;
?

If i put it right after if (printJob.start()) , nothing happens.
Using flexreport from repo and Flex 3

I get like 11 pages on a 4 page print.

Paulo Gouvêa 07.17.09 / 10am

I’m developing my first work with FlexReport, and I got a problem that I could not solve.
When I execute a preview of a report, nothing is showing in preview page!!! but a little image at the left site of the window, show a report. I’ve been made everything that I could to do, and every procedures that I made solved the problem. I´don’t know what to do…. Please!!! somebody can help me?

FlexReport – promising printing API for Flex « Jachus Blog 09.24.09 / 9am

[…] FlexReport homepage […]

sivakumar 10.03.09 / 4am

I using FlexReport tool and it is very useful for me. Can anyone help me to resolve font resolution issue while exporting as PDF and also during printing the document. i found some issues i.e., expected pages to print is 3 but it is printing 5 pages.

Looking for somebody help.

Anthony 10.08.09 / 12pm

Frederico. Thank you for your hard work.
I’m working on an app that uses FlexReport and creates a PDF. The client wants to switch the layout to landscape.

What is the best practice for this? I tried changing the template’s height and width but it rendered all weird in print preview window.

Thanks.

Joe 11.04.09 / 5am

Hi Federico,

I try to print multiple datagrids, each lead by a proper label, over multiple pages, like this:

[LABEL_1]
[DATAGRID_1]

[LABEL_2]
[DATAGRID_2]
…

Does your component support that?

Thanks, cheers!
Joe

FlexReport

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