Hope you all like it

I delivered the project, and I then decided that there were a few components I should extend more so they could be reused in future projects, and printing was the part that took me longer and brought most unexpected issues (issues that I really didn’t want to deal with again).

After a few days I had a prototype of a reporting framework for Flex. I thought it could be really useful to others, and it should be released to the public. And FlexReport was born.

A few months have passed and I’m really happy that I did open source FlexReport. I’ve received many bug reports, fixes and recently some contributions of new features. I’m about to release a new version and many of the improvements were not made by me or are suggestions I received. By open sourcing FlexReport I donated many hours of my work, but in return it is much better than it’d be if I just kept it for my own projects.

My point is: open source is good!

It’s good for those who release them, as they get developers and beta testers for free.

It’s good for users. Open source projects tend to having active user communities helping each other. You’ll probably get better and faster support on these kind of projects then on most commercial products.

It’s good for contributors. If you fix a bug, implement new features, make some kind of improvement to a open source project you should contribute it. Not only as a retribution for hard work other people offered you, but also to make the product you use better.

I’d like to thank all the people who contributed to FlexReport

FlexReport is a client-side report generation component. The reports are based on actionscript3/mxml templates which are deployed embeded in the application. FlexReport is also a set of components designed for general-purpose printing in Flex. The communication with the server is only required to retrieve the data.

Jasper4Flex is a parser for Jasper. The reports are generated on the server-side by Jasper, based on templates written in Jasper’s own syntax. They are then parsed by the client.

Which one is better? None! It all depends on your requirements and skills. If you are not confortable with Jasper or you don’t have a Java-enabled server you should go with FlexReport. On the other side, if you have the need to integrate your reports with other applications, Jasper4Flex would have a significant advantage. In terms of performance FlexReport should be faster, since only the data is loaded from the server.

In the end it’s just like apples and oranges, you can’t get much juice from apples and you don’t make pies with oranges!

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.