JasperSoft Solutions for Developers

Technology Highlight: Open Symphony SiteMesh and Spring Web Flow

Your application. Your look and feel.

Trust that users can continue to experience your application–not a third-party add-on–when you embed JasperSoft. Applying your fonts and colors is simply a matter of updating cascading style sheets (CSS files). More complex branding and design tasks are managed with Open Symphony SiteMesh and Spring Web Flow.

Open Symphony SiteMesh: Reskinning

Open Symphony SiteMesh is used to apply a consistent look and feel to Web pages. This is also called "reskinning."

SiteMesh works by intercepting and parsing plain HTML application output from JasperServer. SiteMesh then "decorates" the plain HTML to create the pages that users see. It extracts the <title>, <head>, and <body> tagged content from the plain HTML and inserts it into a template, called a "decorator" file. The final, decorated page is delivered to the user's web browser. SiteMesh makes it easy and safe to integrate, brand, and re-design the Web page layout and design without affecting JasperSoft code or your application's code.

Spring Web Flow

Often developers will need to guide users from one state in an application to a report, and then back to the original state or on to another part of the application. Spring Web Flow provides a framework that allows you to manage reusable "flows" between states and views (Web pages). Rather than managing transition and state in application code (which is cumbersome and therefore difficult to write, test, and maintain), reusable views, decisions, and transitions between pages are configured as flows in XML files.

What this means is that with a little configuration, you can incorporate reporting and analytics into any part of the application, thereby increasing the value of your application and enriching the overall user experience.

"Prior to Jaspersoft4Salesforce we had to run several reports, download them to Excel and then modify them to meet our needs. It took one person at each of our eleven campuses several hours to complete each week. Now we just run the report in less than a minute. It has provided tremendous time and resource savings to the college." - Heald College