Jinfonet Software announced the release of JReport 7.3. This new version of the market-leading Java reporting offering provides numerous improvements to the product's usability, information delivery capabilities and enterprise-class embedded reporting.

Topping the list of new features are: enhancements to make the report designer's job easier; stronger support for report localization; and improvements to strengthen JReport as an enterprise-class reporting solution. These enhancements help make JReport 7.3 the most complete embedded reporting solution for large enterprise deployments.

JReport 7.3 includes many enhancements to the product's usability and performance. One enhancement that will be of special interest to existing customers is the redesigned product documentation and enhanced help system. The JReport Help System now supports full text searches and graphical navigation through multi-level indexes and tables of content. The HTML-based system continues to be cross-platform and browser independent. It is designed to provide quality content targeted to the specific user of JReport (report developer, report administrator, application programmer, and report end user). Click here to test drive the new JReport Enhanced Help System.

Other priority enhancements include:

• Enhanced National Language Support - provides visual tools for report designers so they can visualize report layout in other languages prior to publishing
• User-defined Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Support - gives developers the ability to easily maintain libraries of reports that can be customized for specific consumers of the information based on their style needs
• Performance Watchdog Capabilities - protects the JReport system from being impacted by external failures
• Headless Support - eliminates the need to use a third party graphical library when deploying applications in large server-farm environments

For a detailed list of enhancements included in JReport 7.3, please click here.

Application developers spend endless days on the road to technology improvement. As they try to make progress in their journey, they may face roadblocks, alternate routes and construction zones that slow them down, but they're still responsible for reaching their destination. Already a rough road, a new pothole has popped up in the form of operational business intelligence (BI).

Operational BI makes BI more flexible, transparent and cost-effective by tightly integrating traditional BI functionality with an organization's existing and ever-evolving business processes. It makes BI more process aware and real-time enabled, leading to better visibility into daily operations.

Operational BI is quickly becoming a key requirement for virtually all new enterprise applications. With operational BI, data presentation and analysis will no longer be artificially limited to BI applications. Intelligence will be embedded into applications, systems and Web sites - and the intelligence will be accessible by end users throughout the enterprise. It enables a new type of BI by displaying data in the context of enterprise applications, allowing for better business decisions.

Developers need to be ready for what's coming down the road. It's important they're aware of the pending requirements for operational BI. It's even more important they understand that satisfying the requirements doesn't have to be a five-car pileup. Click here to read more >>

In large organizations, it is common for projects to have more than one report developer working on the design, development, and maintenance of the report templates. Each developer works within the context of one or more catalogs. To allow templates or report objects to be shared among the report developers, or to simplify the deployment of reports, multiple catalogs can be merged into one central catalog.

To ensure that the catalog merge goes smoothly, report developers should adhere to the following guidelines:

1. All catalogs to be merged must have the same name.
2. Because all of the eventual resources in the merged catalog need to have unique names, report developers should adopt a general naming convention. This convention defines how to name the resources (queries, formulas, parameters, summaries, reports, and so on) in their original catalogs so that there is no naming conflict in the merged catalog.

To merge two catalogs (source and target), follow these steps:

1. Open the source catalog, and then open one report within that catalog.
2. Choose File > Save To, and a dialog appears prompting you to indicate where you want to save this report.
3. Browse to the directory that contains the target catalog (catalogs have the suffix .cat) and then click the Save button.
   
   A warning message indicates that there is already a catalog of the same name in the target directory and asks whether you would like to merge the resources into the catalog.
4. Click the Yes button in this message.
   
   A Merge dialog is displayed, which lists the resources used by the current report and whether there are any conflicting resource names with the target catalog. If conflicts do exist, a red question mark is displayed on top of the resource name. Fix the conflicting names; the Merge button will not be enabled until all the conflicting resources are fixed.
5. Click the Merge button.
6. Repeat the steps above to merge all the reports in the source catalog with those in the target catalog.

If you have additional technical needs, please click here to contact our support team directly.