Business Data, Inc. (BDI), a leading provider of financial document outsourcing, has embedded JReport into its eStatements solution to enable seamless Web delivery of financial documents in compliance with federal SAS-70 requirements for guaranteeing customer data security.

 "Since the adoption of SAS-70, we could no longer transmit customer data via email," says BDI's director of software development, Stacey Taylor. "JReport enables us to deliver eStatements over a secure FTP site and then automatically notifies our clients via email." To further ensure only authorized access to data, BDI leveraged JReport's flexible security model by integrating it with their existing security schemes to provide single sign-on capabilities with customized authentication.

In addition, BDI's developers have reported significant time savings and more precise report development with JReport. Prior to embedding JReport, BDI's developers would manually update approximately 300 reports every month, writing SQL commands and saving each report to a file that would later be printed and mailed to customers. This process was time consuming and left room for human error. With JReport enabling BDI to automate this process via the Web, BDI's customers can now access their reports securely online, when they want them. And, they have the ability to change report parameters at runtime in order to get customized, updated information on demand.  

To learn more, contact Jinfonet at 240-477-1000 or info@jinfonet.com.

A state Department of Labor recently developed a Web application that would automate and simplify the process of applying for unemployment insurance, extending claims, and filing for weekly benefits.  

The application needed to be able to satisfy over 300 state and federal requirements for unemployment insurance reporting. The department faced a significant challenge, however, because state and federal requirements governing report format and content are subject to change as new laws and directives are adopted, making the process of creating and maintaining report templates a tedious process.

After evaluating several solutions, JReport was selected because it was 100% J2EE compatible, integrated seamlessly in a WebSphere application server, and offered better report design features than its competitors.  

Among these features is JReport's ability to re-use report components. By being able to edit a single report component and then dynamically propagate that change across multiple reports, JReport has enabled the department to realize a 100% increase in developer productivity. 

With JReport, the department has also been able to generate and maintain templates for over a hundred different reports daily. These reports are automatically deployed by JReport to several government divisions across the state and to federal agencies.  JReport has equipped the department to provide quality service across their organization, to other agencies, and most importantly to the workers they serve.

Developers can utilize JReport's tag libraries and inline frames to easily embed reports into their Web applications. 

JReport provides a collection of re-usable tags that reduce the need to write and manage code for customizing an application's reporting capabilities.  JReport supports both embedded and component tags.  Embedded tags enable DHTML reports to be displayed without a frame.  Component tags allow for customization of report actions and functionality.  With JReport's component tags, developers can precisely position reporting components like sort and filter panels, navigation bars, and table of contents anywhere within a JSP.  

Using Inline Frames, developers can also embed reports directly into their Web application. An "iframe" is actually a construct that creates a subwindow within a webpage.  This subwindow is of fixed size, but is treated by the browser as a complete and separate document which will automatically provide scroll bars should its content be too large for the allocated space.  Iframes can be placed anywhere within a document, even within a text block, so developers can very precisely define where they want a report to appear within their application.  Within the iframe, any content can be placed, including interactive reports that can be dynamically sorted, filtered, etc. without affecting surrounding content.

For example, to embed the JReport seen below, the developer used an iframe that was created with only a few lines of code: