[jboss-user] [JBoss Seam] - Re: Excel support in Seam: any interest?

[jazir1979]

Fair enough -- it's very true that these tools are a world unto themselves and require a fair investment in building the report designs.  If Seam can provide some of this stuff without requiring a reporting framework, then that's great.

In my experience in the enterprise java space, our teams have never had the luxury of a "reporting guy" and we've always had to just make things work either doing our own custom thing (ouch!) or using Jasper Reports (I've found BIRT is not yet ready for prime time).

Jasper is not so hard to integrate into a web app, I have it working now with a custom JSF component that lets you input parameters and preview the report, keeping a JasperPrint object in its state so you can then export to any output type over the web at the click of an h:commandButton, without re-running the report query and rendering phases.

Jasper supports inline EJB3 QL queries now, although I still find that the only truly flexible way is to run the query in your code and provide a custom JRAbstractBeanDataSource implementation (as outline for Hibernate in http://www.hibernate.org/79.html).

I suppose both approaches (more output options in Seam, and some integration with Jasper) would add value, I'm just trying to give another perspective :)

great work on all this stuff guys!
Daniel.

"gavin.king at jboss.com" wrote : anonymous wrote : I do love the idea of the PDF templating using facelets in Seam for doing up quick documents and e-mails -- but the idea of adding Excel support then leads to the plethora of other output formats that you can think of.. and does all that fluff (and re-inventing of the wheel) really belong in Seam? 
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  | It's not like this stuff needs to be deeply integrated into the Seam core, its just an add-on jar, no big deal. That doesn't count as bloat, IMO.
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  | anonymous wrote : I think most people who need a large variety of output formats will settle on a more full-featured reporting framework anyway.
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  | The trouble is that reporting tools like these are kindof a world unto themselves, and its difficult to seamlessly integrate their capabilities into the flow and look and feel of your application.  Plus its a totally alien programming model to learn. (Usually, done by some "reporting guy" on the project.) I think its highly useful to have some limited set of reporting capabilities available in the web framework.

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