Dynamic reports using Jasper

Today, I spend a good 1 hr brainstorming the design to build dynamic reports in Jasper. A lot of customers demand the need to create dynamic reports at run-time; i.e. choose the number of columns, sorting order, group-by, etc.

Now as we know in Jasper, the first thing that needs to be done is to create the *.jrxml file. Typically for static reports, this is done through the report designer. But for dynamic reports, we need to create or modify a part of this jrxml file at run-time based on the user's input. For doing this, we have the the following options.

1) Template Engine: Here we would have a base jrxml file and then manipulate the base template file using a template engine such as 'Velocity' of 'FreeMarker'. The trick would be to have all possible mark-up in the base template and then remove sections as required. The drawback of this approach is that this will work only for simple dynamic requirements; such as add/remove columns. But if we need to add dynamic groups/sub-totals, then it might become cumbersome.

2) JasperDesign Object: A JasperDesign object is a run-time in-memory representation of the jrxml object. We can have a base jrxml and then load it into a JasperDesign object and then manipulate the object. A good example explaining this is available here. This is a good trade-off as you have some basic 'layout logic' in the jrxml template and are just manipulating the dynamic part of the 'layout-logic' using the JasperDesign API code.

Though it is possible to fully create the 'layout logic' through code, it would result in a maintenance nighmare for any small change in the future !!!! The Jasper library also has an example that creates the full jrxml file from scratch.

3) DynamicJasper Library: One alternative approach is to use a far simpler library such as DynamicJasper to create the report template from 100% pure Java code. This API is a bit more high-level than using the low level JasperDesign API as it makes many default layout assumptions that should suffice for 99% of use-cases.
Also you can use a base template *.jrxml file in which common styles, company logo, water mark, etc can be pre-defined. It also supports "Style library" from jrxml files.