JasperSoft - JasperSoft BI Suite: Distribution Rights

Frequently Asked Questions

	Who is JasperSoft?
	What does commercial open source mean?
	How does JasperSoft fit into this open source model?
	Can you provide a little more information about JasperReports and JasperDecisions?
	What is an operational reporting solution?
	Is operational reporting an end-user tool?
	What does the term “embedded” mean?
	How is that different from integrating a reporting solution with an application?
	Many reporting solution vendors say they offer embedded reporting solutions. How can you tell if they truly do?
	You talk about self-service reporting. What does that mean?
	How is JasperSoft reporting different from OLAP?
	What is RDL?
	How is the RDL file organized?
	Where are queries and reports stored?
	Can I re-brand the reporting tools?
	What is a dashboard?
	We have XML developers who like to hand-code using their favorite editor. Is that supported?
	Self-Service
	What are the benefits of ad hoc reporting?
	What are the steps involved in creating a JasperDecisions report?
	Every reporting vendor claims that they enable user report creation. How is JasperSoft different?
	Parameterization
	What is the parameterization model?
	What is a dynamic query?
	How does the user benefit from a dynamic query?
	Will developers have to define every basic element of a report to be up and running?
	How do I reuse elements of reports I’ve already created?
	J2EE Infrastructure
	How is internationalization supported?
	Integration
	How can JasperDecisions reports be integrated into other Web applications or portals?
	How can I get my JasperDecisions reports to Microsoft Excel?
	I already have a security infrastructure in place. Do I need to duplicate it for JasperDecisions?
	Do we provide a Struts module?
	Are we JSP or servlet based?
	Do you require an EJB container?
	How do you avoid hitting the database over and over again?
	Do you have a scheduler?
	Do you support email notification?
	Security
	How do you authenticate users?
	Do you support SSO?
	Do you support my existing roles and groups?
	Do you support JMX?

Who is JasperSoft?
JasperSoft is a global company that provides the leading commercial open source operational reporting solution, with offices in Silicon Valley, CA and Bucharest, Romania. JasperSoft has been focused on the operational reporting needs of organizations since 2001.

What does commercial open source mean?
Companies who offer commercial open source products provide their customers and community with choice, opportunity and investment protection. These companies offer a quality, well engineered open source product that meets the general needs of their community. Typically, these companies will also offer the ability to purchase service and support products in order to help the community get the most value out of their open source product. A commercial open source company will go a step further and offer added value product modules that can be purchased for a reasonable price. These modules are not mandatory for gaining benefits from the open source product - but rather they can be added if and when needed by an application based on its evolving requirements.

How does JasperSoft fit into this open source model?
JasperSoft offers JasperReports, its open source embedded operational reporting library solution, and JasperDecisions, its commercial embedded operational reporting server-based solution. The needs of the application will dictate which of the two solutions is a more appropriate fit.

Can you provide a little more information about JasperReports and JasperDecisions?
JasperReports is the world’s most popular open source reporting solution on the market. Its embedded operational reporting library is currently being used in over 10,000 installations world-wide and its website hosts over 10,000 software downloads per month. The developer attraction to JasperReports is due to its ease of embeddability, high product quality and its application fit. JasperReports specializes in the ability to deliver rich content onto the screen, to the printer or into PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV and XML files. For more information about JasperReports visit www.jaspersoft.com/pr_jasperreports.html .

JasperDecisions is JasperSoft’s embeddable server-based operational reporting solution. Designed as a modular architecture, JasperDecisions provides developers with a highly interactive approach to delivering mission critical information directly from operational applications in real time. In addition to being server-based, JasperDecisions offers repository, scheduler, dashboard/portal and security modules as well as a full graphical report designer. Our customers who embed JasperDecisions into their applications enjoy the high degree of interactivity that is provided through our ad-hoc and user self-service capabilities. For more information about JasperDecisions, visit
www.jaspersoft.com/pr_jasperdecisions.html .

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What is an operational reporting solution?
Operational reporting solutions are a new class of reporting solution that, when embedded into an application, delivers mission critical business information in real time—directly from the application. Operational reporting solutions provide end users with critical information about day-to-day operations, enabling higher quality decisions at the beginning of a business process—vastly improving the results.

Is operational reporting an end-user tool?
Actually, operational reporting benefits the entire enterprise. By delivering up-to-the minute and accurate business process information to end users, more informed and higher quality decisions can be made. Operational reporting significantly minimizes the knee jerk decisions that tend to get made at the managerial level of a company long after the process has taken a wrong turn.

What does the term “embedded” mean?
Embedded is the way in which the reporting solution and the related application work together. An embedded reporting solution becomes an actual part of the application code. It is as if the developer coded the reporting capabilities directly into the code during the process of developing the application itself.

How is that different from integrating a reporting solution with an application?
Integrating a reporting solution with an application means simply that the two speak to each other. Integrating does not provide the same benefits that embedding does. Integrated application cannot give the appearance of being one with the application. An example of this is in order to place reporting into a user portal, the reporting solution must be embedded into the portal – to execute directly from within the portal. Integrating cannot accomplish this and for some companies, having two end user interfaces – one for the reporting solution and one for the portal, is simply not acceptable. In other words, embedding allows the user to work within a single interface, the portal, to get the information he/she needs to make high quality decisions. Integrating allows the reporting solution to communicate to the portal but it forces the user to switch between two different and separate interfaces to get information.

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Many reporting solution vendors say they offer embedded reporting solutions. How can you tell if they truly do?
It is all in the architecture. Reporting vendors who offer truly embeddable solutions for Web applications have engineered their products out of 100% Java. Any component within their architecture that is not Java, for example a C++ reporting server or engine, is not embeddable into Web applications such as a portal. Plugging in a browser-based user interface does not qualify as an embeddable reporting solution since it naturally runs outside of the engine or server. It is the engine or server components that are the most important to be 100% Java. Both JasperReports and JasperDecisions are 100% Java and therefore, are embeddable operational reporting solutions.

You talk about self-service reporting. What does that mean?
Self-service reporting is the next level of report viewing - report analysis by the end user. Self-service reporting empowers end users to drill down to the next level of data. By empowering the user, IT overhead is minimal while deploying powerful, parameterized report viewing and analytic capabilities to an entire user community.

How is JasperSoft reporting different from OLAP?
JasperSoft provides real-time or near-time reporting from your existing information sources. JasperSoft manages access to your transaction data source through an efficient data access mechanism with minimal impact. OLAP tools generally require a data warehouse, which may not be updated to provide real-time or near-time data. Typically, OLAP tools require trained users and client software.

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What is RDL?
Report Definition Language (RDL) is an XML-compliant custom tag language. The JasperDecisions Scope Creation Suite of tools can create RDL files. JasperDecisions RDL files are well documented so developers can directly create, view, or edit these files. Traditional reporting systems use proprietary, undocumented, binary files for this purpose.

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How is the RDL file organized?
The RDL file is organized into the following sections:

Content specifies the data content of the report. It can contain one or more data blocks, which describe the data to be used within the report. Each data source (query) may receive its data from a different type of data provider, such as a relational database, XML file, Enterprise Java Bean (EJB), or a custom data provider.

Parameters contain the available parameters for that particular report. Parameters are essentially variables that contain data entered by the user at runtime - they are used by the “report generators” to determine content and layout properties dynamically at run-time. Parameters are typically bound to user interface controls in the report’s layout section.

Pagination determines how the content is broken up into data segments for the report. There can be multiple pagination sections and each pagination tag specifies how an individual data set should be paginated, or broken up into segments for easier display on a Web page.

Sorting specifies how individual columns of data are sorted. There can be multiple sorting sections. Each sorting tag specifies the data query on which it operates and contains one or more SortOrder tags that determine whether a given column is sorted in an ascending or descending fashion.

Layout determines the visual structure and appearance of the data within a report. It contains both layout components, called report components, and user interface controls, called layout controls, that act upon the parameters supplied to the report. JasperDecisions ships with five standard report components, the first three representing data in a variety of tabular formats and the last two representing data in a variety of chart formats.

Where are queries and reports stored?
Reports are stored in the library and queries are stored in the catalog. The JasperDecisions library is a repository for the storage and management of report definition files and report output results, data sets, metadata, and security information. The catalog is a sub-component of the library, specifically designed for the storage and re-use of report development elements, such as queries, permissions, parameters, and report styles or “themes”.

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Can I re-brand the reporting tools?
Yes. You can modify the reports and charts and even Scope Center to match your Web site’s look and feel.
How is the JasperDecisions system administered?
Through the JasperDecisions Scope Center. Administrators are provided their own Web-based portal with additional access to the library for directory folder and file management, security management, scheduling, usage and performance monitoring, and system log monitoring.

Library file management − The Scope Center console allows administrators to edit, delete, and re-upload library files including RDL report definition files, report results, and other static files stored within the JasperDecisions library (PDF, CSV, XML, XLS, HTML). Also, the administrator can view metadata information about each file (when it was uploaded, when it was last modified, and who uploaded it).

Security permissions management − Security can be managed at the directory level, file level, or at the report level. Users or groups can be granted or denied ability to read, write, run, and schedule files within the library.

Scheduling management − The JasperDecisions Scope Server offers a robust scheduling capability. Users can schedule any report to run if they are given the “schedule” privilege. Administrators have the ability to view all the active schedules and edit or delete them. This ensures that someone is able to balance the overall reporting systems’ scheduling resource usage.

Performance monitoring − Administrators can easily get usage and performance statistics across the system or at an individual Scope basis. This makes it easy to determine which are the most frequently run reports, easy–to-identify bottlenecks in data queries versus report formatting process, and find unused reports and redundant queries.

Systems log monitoring − Administrators can remotely monitor the Scope Server’s system logs, enabling quick problem resolution and understanding of system usage.

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What is a dashboard?
A dashboard provides an interactive view of data by combining reports or tables, charts, and graphs into a single, consolidated view. This allows key decision makers to focus on key business performance metrics, and to drill down into desired details.

We have XML developers who like to hand-code using their favorite editor. Is that supported?
Yes. The JasperDecisions Scope Creation Suite clients generate an XML-compliant custom tag language, called RDL. Developers can use the Scope Creation Suite or any XML editor to write RDL definition files for processing. Therefore, we provide you the option to integrate your existing XML editors, or use the XML editor provided by JasperDecisions.

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Self-Service

What are the benefits of ad hoc reporting?
The user has control in creating a new report, without the ongoing requests to IT to build/design new reports.

What are the steps involved in creating a JasperDecisions report?
To create a report, the user selects an existing report from the Scope Center, clicks on Ad Hoc Wizard, which launches the wizard. The user then chooses whether the desired report will be a table or a chart. After selecting columns and column order, the user can choose one or more levels of grouping. They can also set column aggregation functions such as sum, count, min, or max. The user can then apply a style from a style palette and run the report. Using this simple step-by-step guide, the Ad Hoc Wizard allows a novice user to create the report with no training.

Every reporting vendor claims that they enable user report creation. How is JasperSoft different?
Reporting vendors allow users to create reports and view the results. However, IT has to custom develop the front-end Web interface, use custom code for applying parameter values, and tie Web controls together with the report output results, which are generally not native HTML. The question is, “How much flexibility does the user have in defining the query, the columns, the report style and format, and do they have analysis capabilities?” JasperDecisions can deploy to the total user population. This requires control by IT, yet provides the flexibility and power for the user. Through rapid development, out-of-the-box parameterization and report components, JasperDecisions provides zero training report creation and modification plus analysis capabilities through a self-service model.

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Parameterization

What is the parameterization model?
JasperDecisions parameterization model provides the user execution of interactive, parameterized reports throughout the product. A parameter is a variable whose value can be changed dynamically at run-time, allowing for the interactivity and dynamic reporting nature of JasperDecisions. The ability to build parameterized reports quickly in a repeatable fashion is unique to JasperDecisions. By leveraging the parameterization model, almost everything within the application can be parameterized from data queries to report layout formats. Specifically, it provides dynamic reporting queries, column selectors, and group by parameters; dynamic format capability with out-of-the-box Web controls; and pre-built parameterized report layout components.

What is a dynamic query?
By enabling the user to pick the appropriate data parameter values at run-time for a pre-defined report, developers are freed from minor change requests that are necessary with traditional, static data queries and reports.

How does the user benefit from a dynamic query?
The main benefit of a dynamic query is that it supports many different views of the data through one query.

Will developers have to define every basic element of a report to be up and running?
No, developers need only define the access to the data sources of the report.

How do I reuse elements of reports I’ve already created?
JasperDecisions allows report developers to save portions of their report definitions for sharing with other developers and re-use them in the future. The JasperDecisions catalog re-use and reference model provides a centralized control of queries and other core report definition components, allowing report designers to focus on the specific appearance and layout of individual reports.

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J2EE Infrastructure

How is internationalization supported?
JasperDecisions provides full internationalization (i18n) support to accommodate the presentation of reports in different languages, cultural contexts, currencies, data and time zones. The JasperDecisions Scope Server and Scope Creation Suite use Unicode for internal data representation. This provides the ability to display text in any language and to accept data from any Unicode or non-Unicode database. By providing Unicode support, JasperDecisions can store and represent characters from any language. In order to support the localization of report text in different languages, JasperDecisions has externalized all of its user interface-based strings for errors, and logging. All report output formats (HTML, CSV, PDF, XLS, and XML) will support the generation of a report in any language or with multiple languages in one report.

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Integration

How can JasperDecisions reports be integrated into other Web applications or portals?
The APIs provided by the JasperDecisions Scope Server allow your applications to call SOAP or HTTP protocols in order to embed reportlets within your existing Web pages or portals. JasperDecisions produces native HTML output so no transformation from a proprietary output format to HTML is necessary. This results in seamless and high performance Web page integration.

How can I get my JasperDecisions reports to Microsoft Excel?
JasperDecisions provides a tight Excel integration where users are able to interact directly with the Scope Server, be authenticated, search through reports, run the queries, and refresh data - all from within Excel.

I already have a security infrastructure in place. Do I need to duplicate it for JasperDecisions?
No. The JasperDecisions Scope Server delivers a flexible and sophisticated security architecture, which provides easy integration with your security infrastructure. JasperDecisions security is user/role based and typically will be integrated with a Web application or directory services database that already collects the appropriate user and role information.

Do we provide a Struts module?
No. The Struts framework is based on the MVC design model for JSP.

Are we JSP or servlet based?
Both. The JasperDecisions Scope Server is a set of servlets. The Scope components and the portal (Scope Center) are JSP based.

Do you require an EJB container?
No, we do not require an EJB container. However, if you have an EJB data source, JasperDecisions can access it out of the box.

How do you avoid hitting the database over and over again?
JasperDecisions supports interactive stored results where you have a fully interactive snapshot of the data that is cached and refreshed on a scheduled basis.

Do you have a scheduler?
Yes, an enterprise class scheduler is built into the product.

Do you support email notification?
Yes, via Java mail.

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Security

How do you authenticate users?
The authentication model controls who can log into the Scope Server. It is comprised of an authentication filter that manages sessions and the logon screen for collecting user name and password, and an authentication module for processing username and password for validity. It is based on Sun’s Java Authentication and Authorization (JAAS) module. Modules are available for NT domains, Kerberos, etc. There are three authentication configuration modes for the JasperDecisions system:

Internal authentication − uses the standard JasperDecisions authentication filter to always collect the user name and password and call the JasperDecisions JAAS module to validate the user ID and password.

External authentication − bypasses the JasperDecisions authentication filter and JAAS module, but still requires that the user name exist in the directory. Used for single sign-on (SSO) integration.

None − bypasses the authentication filter and JAAS module and allows any user name to be a valid logon name.

Do you support SSO?
Yes. See external authentication above.

Do you support my existing roles and groups?
Yes, JasperDecisions ships an example of SQL queries that represent a typical user database structure. You can completely customize by specifying the exact SQL query for getting user, role, and group information.

Do you support JMX?
No, Java management extensions are currently not supported.

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The Market Leader in Open Source Business Intelligence

Self-Service

Parameterization

J2EE Infrastructure

Integration

Security