Creating Report Templates in iReport

Tweaking an existing report template

Yesterday I looked at finding the existing report templates in iReport. Today I’ll modify one to create a better template.

Open classicT.jrxml in iReport 3.5. I want to make a few look-and-feel changes to get a nicer template.

• Reformat the title to use less space
• Change the background color in all group labels to white (transparent) and the font color to black.
• Change the default format for the date in the Page Footer. I want it to use Java’s MEDIUM format and to be appropriate for whatever locale the report is run in:
  original: new Date()
  modified: DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.MEDIUM, $P{REPORT_LOCALE}).format( new Date() )

Save the file as NeoClassicT.jrxml into the folder Templates somewhere on my harddrive. Also copy classicT.gif to NeoClassicT.gif.

The menu Tools -> Options opens the iReport options. The tab Wizard Templates allows me to add the folder “Templates”. I could add the jrxml file directly, but I prefer to add a folder so that additional templates will be picked up automatically.

Did it work?

Choose the menu File -> New… -> Report Wizard. Go through the wizard as usual, but on Step 7 I now see both the default template “Classic” and my new template “NeoClassicT”. Hooray.

If I were truly motivated I would modify NeoClassicT.gif to show a more accurate thumbnail of the template.

The file names are important. They must be “*T.jrxml” or “*C.jrxml”. iReport decides if they are columnar or tabular templates based on these names. Likewise, it matches up the thumbnail preview image based on name matching.