Chapter 23: Crystal Reports with Java

While the core Crystal Reports designer remains solidly in the Windows arena, Java environments and development tools are becoming more popular. This fact, along with a steady movement toward web-based environments, has led Business Objects to embrace web and Java interfaces for Crystal Reports integration. New to Crystal Reports 10 is the Java Reporting Component, yet another foray into Java integration for Crystal Reports “ based applications. The Java Reporting Component includes a Java Viewer class that supports typical Crystal Reports interactivity, such as group tree navigation and drill-down.

The Java Viewer

Java programmers can enhance web pages that are dynamically generated by a JavaServer Page (JSP) application to include a Crystal report by using the Java Crystal Report web viewer, which is known simply as the Java Viewer. Before continuing with this chapter, you might want to brush up on JSP, HTML, and dynamic HTML because you ll be jumping into how to use the Java Viewer right away.

When you hear the term Java Viewer, you probably expect to see an executable program, but you won t find any executable here. Instead, you ll find a collection of Java classes that can be used within a JSP application to display Crystal reports in dynamic HTML pages. The Java Viewer classes can be imported into your application and used not only to display Crystal reports in web pages that your application generates, but also to manipulate Crystal reports.

The greatest benefit of using the Java Viewer is that you can enhance thin-client Java applications to include sophisticated reporting without the hassles commonly encountered when you must write code to generate the report. You basically use the Java Viewer classes to call the Crystal report that your application needs to display on the screen. The Java Viewer classes handle all the nitty-gritty to send the Crystal report to the user of your application.

You ll find a rich set of Java classes in the Java Viewer class package. For example, there are classes that enable your application to export a Crystal report in a variety of formats, giving your Java application versatility without your having to write additional lines of code. You ll see how to export a Crystal report in various formats later in this chapter.