Contents of this manual. Contents of this manual

Note: The order of the chapters will change

The manual should give a complete overview about the basics of the art of report generation and how to solve that task with the JFreeReport library.

The next chapter will start with a short introduction to general report processing techniques and the used algorithms. If you are already familiar with report generation techniques, you can easily skip this chapter.

After that, in chapters three and four, we'll go deeper into installing and configuring JFreeReport. If you are familiar with installing other java libraries, you can safely skip the installation instructions and proceed with the configuration instructions located in chapter four.

The next chapter describes the usage of the supplied GUI components and how they can be configured and customized.

Chapters six to nine describe the object model and the architecture of the JFreeReport library. Every JFreeReport user should have read these chapters, as they are prequesites to use JFreeReport successfully.

The next three chapters will deal with the various methods to create a report definition . We'll start with the simple XML format and proceed to the extended XML format and finally describe the API based report definition methods.

In chapter 13 we'll have a look at common report definition use-cases. The chapter contains several guides on how to define simple lists, invoice style reports or forms using JFreeReport.

The last chapter introduces the various developer tools supplied with JFreeReport and gives a short overview about third-party tools available.