Developer Guide mireport

Version 1.0

February 14th 2010 Author: Florian Mller

richability

Erlenstrasse 5 4410 Liestal

T +41 79 279 1344

[email protected]

http://www.richability.com

Summary
What is mireport?
Reporting is one of the most important points when developing applications, it is nice to store the quarterly company results within your application in order to simply use them, but it is even nicer if you could simply export this data to PDF/Word/xyz in order to present them during a meeting. Adobe Flex offers several nice reporting components within your application, unfortunately you can not export this data (except you wanna pay +/-100.000 $ in order to use LiveCycle Data Service, PDF reporting is part of LCDS). So either you have to launch the application during your meeting or take some screenshots - but anyway nobody will be able to use this data as it is in a non-Excle/Word/xyz format so you end up in typing in the data to your own Excel sheet.

Nice Flex reports but how to use this data in an Excel sheet for example?

On the server side there is a proven technology called JasperReports (http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperreports) which enables you to adress this issue - creating reports based on data stored in your database to whatever format. But how to connect JasperReport on the server and how to push the server generated reports to your Flex application? Thats exactly where mireport comes in, mireport is a simple Flex - JasperReport - interface which allows you to pass paramteres from your Flex application to JasperReports and returns a nice looking report. Currently mireport supports PDF, XLS and RTF output (see screenshot below).

mireport Developers Guide

Who should use mireport?

Any developer heading for the 100% Flex solution should use this component. Anything else like PDF generation within the client based on some libraries is rather workaround than 100% solution. Customers love reports and thats the reason you will love mireport!

How can I use mireport?

mireport ships as simple .swc in order integrate to your Flex client. As report generation actually is executed on the server you also need a counterpart on the server (ships as single jar le) which handles communication with the client component. The web.xml of your application nally needs to point to the servlets used for report generation. Please take a look into our step by step guide which is part of this document.

Is mireport usage free of charges?

There is a version calles mireport basic available free of any charges, this version is limited to PDF generation. If you requires RTF/XLS generation there is a version called mireport advance, pricing is 79 $ - please order via [email protected].

Anything else to know about mireport?

mireport can be used with Flex 3 (Halo based component) and Flex 4 (Spark based component). Flex 4 provides pretty easy skinning capabilities, thats the reason the nice (at least we think it is nice ;-)) metal background is only supported with Flex 4 usage. The Flex 3 version does not look as nice as the metal one, but works exactly the same way (same API etc.) the Flex 4 version does.

mireport Developers Guide

1 Getting started with mireport

The Getting Started part uses a simple demo project, based on the demo project the usage of mireport will be shown. You just need to get the basic idea of hooking the mireport Flex component to the server part, anything beyond this (such as creating magnicent reports for example) is core JasperReport knowledge, thats where repsonsibility of mireport stops and your creativity drops in. The demo project is based on Flex 4 and created with Flash Builder 4, if you are using Flex 3 this does not make any difference except some screenshots might look litte different. The example requires another application besides Flash/Flex Builder called iReport (http://jasperforge.org/plugins/project/ project_home.php?projectname=ireport), iReport is a report designer which enables you to setup your Jasper reports (.jrxml les) within minutes. In case you are confused about iReport, JasperReport, mireport and Flex and wonder how these pieces t together you should not worry, we will explain the big picture within the next chapter!

1.2 Concepts
As already said, JasperReport is the heart of the whole report generation, JasperReport has nothing to do with Flex, its a core Java based reporting engine. Of course any report requires data, so JasperReport does not create .pdf/.xls etc. only, JasperReport links in the data to the report as well. In a nuthsell: you dene a report layout and a query, JasperReport does the rendering and mixes in the data, fetched from the database directly. See the following scribble for assertion.

mireport Developers Guide

Ok, you got it? The developer somehow (we will talk about this in the next paragraph) denes how the report should look like and which data in terms of which query is tied into the report. This information is passed to the JasperReport Engine which actually querries the database and renders the report. Thats the core of all and we have encapsulated the core in order to save your time and money... As already mentioned, the developer somehow needs to bundle the report layout data and the query behind. Thats what iReport does, iReport enables developers to create reports via Drag & Drop instead of coding Jasper XML. So your starting point, before you tie in our report component to your Flex application is always iReport.

Now that you got the core idea of JasperReport and iReport lets start to chalk out the big picture. Lets take a look on the mireport component within the context of a Flex application. Please have a look into the following gure:

mireport Developers Guide

The mireport component is embedded into a default Flex application. The component is initialized with several parameters (we will discuss these in detail when starting our example), these parameters cause the component to contact the server. On the server side a mireport Servlet handles the incoming requests, extracts parameters and triggers report generation. The report is returned as a link to the application, the link is resolved immediately and the report is being displayed. Why do we return a link instead of returning PDF/RTF/XLS data directly? Well, the reason is that browsers behave totally different when receiving RTF data for instance (books could be published with this so called MIME type browser behavior...). Some browsers might open the result directly, others re up an applications and some do not display RTF at all. So we can not guarantee what happens with the result. But what we can guarantee: HTML is always displayed perfectly - so we simply return HTML (this will be displayed within the preview) and links to the PDF/RTF/XLS les generated on the server. The user can press one of the icons and dependent on the browser behavior the le will be opened. Or the user presses right mouse - save target as in order to save the source of the link. But you should not care about those details as we already cared for them, so you simply can use our component as is. The important point is the servlet and the Flex mireport component: these talk to each other and return the desired report to the Flex client. Of course static querries are boring as you are able to receive one data view only: Select * from User will always return all users - but what if you want all users aged > 20 in your report? JasperReport enables you as well to create reports with parameter based querries, for example you could create a report based on a query called Select * from User where age > $parameter and pass in the parameter - dependent on what you pass in the report result will change. The mireport component allows you to pass in query parameters as well, we will see this during the example - so you are not limited to static reports, your reports differ dependent on the data passed in from the client.

2 mireport by example
Now that you got the backgrounds we simply start using the component, you will see usage is pretty straight forward and benet to your application is immensly.

2.1 Prerequisits
The following applications are required to be installed/available on your machine: Flex/Flash Builder iReport Application Server (we will be using Tomcat) Database to query against (we will be using MySQL) JasperReport jar les (we packaged these to our bundle, folder called extrenal libs is available) mireport.swc

2.2 Creating the report

Lets start by creating the report. As this is not an iReport tutorial we will quickly step through, in case of issues please refer to iReport help/tutorials as it is not goal of this document to teach you iReport. mireport Developers Guide 5

1/8: launch iReport and select File - New, select a template (we use the template called Coffee Landscape) and launch the report wizzard by select Launch Report Wizzard in the bottom of the screen;

In the next Wizard screen you have to specify a name for the report, lets use myreport. You have to specify a destination as well, make sure you remember the destination as we will require the destination later on.

mireport Developers Guide

Next step is denition of datasource. Select the New button in order to create a new datasource for your report, another Wizard launches which will guide you through the process of creating a new datasource:

Select Database JDBC connection as connection type:

Specify the database credentials (DB user, DB URL etc.) and press save button:

mireport Developers Guide

Ok, back to the originally launched wizard you should be able to pick your newly created datasource now:

You have to specify a report query, of course this query depends on your underlying database. Before you actually start with passing parameters we suggest to start with a simple SELECT * FROM YourTable, in your case YourTable is called Item, a table holding several item positions... mireport Developers Guide 8

The next upcoming dialog can be used to check whether datasource etc. have been specied correctly, if so iReport asks you which columns you want to include to your report. We include all columns except the image column:

The next (nearly last!) dialog will ask you for grouping, we do not specify any grouping:

mireport Developers Guide

Last you can nally create the report by pressing the nish button, the repoirt structure will be displlayed within the iReport application

...thats what your report might look like:

mireport Developers Guide

10

Now you can adapt the report (changing title, adding images etc.), as already mentioned: iReport allows you to do a lot within the space of reporting. You can easily create a report on your own without using any templates, we just used the template approach in order to get fastly some stuff which is working...

2.2 Testing the report

Within the iReport environment you can already now simulate what JasperReport will do later on: connect the database, fetch the data and display the report. Simply select Preview in the header and the whole generation process will be triggered, dependent on your data you should see a report populated with data:

mireport Developers Guide

11

Ok, you got the idea of generation? Then, time has come to smoehow push the report to the client and trigger report generation by the client instead of using the Preview button.

2.3 Important Report adaptions - Java instead of Groovy & Troubleshooting!

Before we start triggering generation from the client there is one important thing we have to change in our report. Since we want JasperReport to create a report based on core Java we have to exclude the Groovy stuff, otherwise Groovy libraries need to be available. Select the top node of your report in the left panel and scroll down the properties window in the right, you will nd an entry called Language there:

mireport Developers Guide

12

Select Java instead of Groovy, save your changes and double check whether your report is still working by switiching to the preview again, in 99% of all reports report generation will fail, you can check the error window in the bottom of iReport there you will nd the cause for the error, iReport will give you message similar to this one:

This is really a nasty error as this error would not occur if iReport was using Java as basic language instead of Groovy stuff. Anyway, to x this issue, double click the error and the expression builder shows displaying the expression causing the error:

mireport Developers Guide

13

In our case an int value is expected but Integer is used: $V{REPORT_COUNT}%2 == 0 So you have to cast the Integer to an int value by appending the following Java afunction: $V{REPORT_COUNT}.intValue()%2 == 0

Now this error should be resolved, often there occurs a second casting error, but simply try whether generation works now by switching to the preview mode. It might fail again by complaining about a boolean/Boolean cast, again double click the error and you might nd something similar to this in the Expression Builder: $V{REPORT_COUNT}.intValue()%2 == 0 This needs to be changed to a Boolean value as a Boolean value is expected: Boolean.valueOf($V{REPORT_COUNT}.intValue()%2 == 0)

2.4 Preparing your Flex client

Ok, lets embed the report component and see some reports within a Flex application. We assume you have created a Flex project, our project is called mireportUsage. The project is a combined Flex/Java project, so all Java and server related stuff goes into this project as well - of course you can setup a second separate project as well in order to handle the backend part but for simplicity we used the combined way. In order to use the report component you simply have to add the mireport.swc to the ex_libs folder:

When creating a MXML le in your project and switiching to the design mode you should see there our new component called Report:

mireport Developers Guide

14

Notice: there is another component called iFrame which also appears in the component panel. mireport heavily uses this component, basically all report visualization is based on an iframe concept. The iframe component is a sparate component, free of charge without any usage limitations, the original component is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/ex-iframe/. Simply drag the Report component to your application, the report component appears on your stage and you can position the component same way you usually do with Flex components.

mireport Developers Guide

15

The component is ready to be congured now (you have to pass in the report being rendered, Server adress etc.), before we actually start the conguration work the server part is hooked in.

2.5 Serverside conguration

First of all you have to add tsome jars to your project (in our case we simply drop these to WebContent/WEB-INF/lib). In the mireport download package there is a folder called external libs, the jars within this folder should be entirely added to your project (except the case you use these already and for this reason already added these within your project). The mireport.jar from the lib folder needs to be added as well. The jars can be described by listing these in different categories: mireport related (lib folder) mireport.jar JasperReport related classes (extrenal libs) jasperreports-3.5.2.jar jfreechart-1.0.13.jar iText-2.1.7.jar poi-3.2-FINAL-20081019.jar Utility related classes (extrenal libs) commons-collections-2.1.jar commons-digester-2.0.jar jcommon-1.0.16.jar Database related (if you are using differnet DB than MySQL your database driver gies here) (extrenal libs) mysql-connector-java-5.0.4-bin.jar As report generation will be triggered from the client you have to modify your web.xml and add the report servlets. SImply add the following snippet to your web.xml: <!-- JasperReport servlet configuration start --> <servlet> <servlet-name>ReportEngine</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.richability.ireport.servlet.ReportServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>ReportEngine</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/ReportEngine</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <servlet> <servlet-name>CredentialServlet</servlet-name> mireport Developers Guide 16

 <servlet-class>com.richability.ireport.servlet.CredentialServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>CredentialServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/CredentialServlet</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <servlet> <servlet-name>PDFServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.richability.ireport.servlet.PDFServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>PDFServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/PDFServlet</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <servlet> <servlet-name>RTFServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.richability.ireport.servlet.RTFServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>RTFServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/RTFServlet</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <servlet> <servlet-name>XLSServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.richability.ireport.servlet.XLSServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>XLSServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/XLSServlet</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <!-- JasperReport HTML image handling --> <servlet> <servlet-name>ImageServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>net.sf.jasperreports.j2ee.servlets.ImageServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>ImageServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/reportImage</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> <!-- Tidy up - deletion of generated reports when session is closed --> <listener>

<listener-class>com.richability.ireport.servlet.SessionListener</listener-class> </listener> <!-- JasperReport servlet configuration end --> mireport Developers Guide 17

Ok, youre almost close to it! In the very early beginning of this guide a report has been created via iReport (we kindly asked you to remember where this report is stored, now time has come to lookup this report again!). This report will be used on the serverside for report generation, so we have to copy this report to the server part of the project. In order to ensure reports are found and looked up correctly you have to create a folder called reports on the same level your WEB-INF folder resides (in one of the next releases we provide path adaption, for the rst release you have to use this static approach which saves you from additional conguration efforts). DO NOT CREATE A FOLDER ON YOUR OWN! Instead of this we prepared a folder for you within the build directory called reports. Copy and paste this folder. Reason for using this folder: this folder contains three images which will be used in the iframes. These images are required, otherwise you wont see PDF/Word/Excel buttons in the report component.

One more thing about images (as the report we have created uses images, the coffee beans). If you use images, iReport will put these to the same level your .jasper le resides. As the images need to be available as well you have to copy the images used in your report as well to the reports folder. A dedicated Jasper servlet will lookup images and embed these to your report, so it is important to have the images in the report folder as well (see the coffee.jpg and coffee_stain.png le). Dont mix the report images with our images in the images folder. The images folder has nothing to do with the images used within your report! Serverside conguration is nished now, in case your application uses several reports simply drop these to the reports folder.

2.6 Putting it all together

Ok, the component is embedded to the client, the server is ready to report, so the lst step is to pass in some parameters to the Flex component as the report currently has no clue which database to connect, which report to generate etc.. We have created a detailed ASdoc which gives you information regarding parameters, simply have a look into the API if things need deeper explanations. Open the Screen containing the Report component and switch to the source view, your component should look like this: <ns1:Report x="37" y="31"> </ns1:Report> 1) Add the database connection parameters (remember: generation is executed on the server, so your server will resolve the database URL - localhost string is totally ne in case the database resides on the same server the servlet container mireport Developers Guide 18

does...): <ns1:Report x="37" y="31" databaseURL="jdbc:mysql://localhost/warehouse" databaseUser="root" databasePassword="" driver="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"> 2) Add the server host as the Flex component needs to know where report generation is executed: <ns1:Report x="37" y="31" databaseURL="jdbc:mysql://localhost/warehouse" databaseUser="root" databasePassword="" host="http://localhost:7070/mireportUsage/"> 3) Add the report you want to display within the component: <ns1:Report x="37" y="31" databaseURL="jdbc:mysql://localhost/warehouse" databaseUser="root" databasePassword="" host="http://localhost:7070/mireportUsage/" reportFile="myreport.jasper"> These basic parameters are always required - for additional parameters (text adaption etc.) please refer to the ASDoc. By the way, you are ready to report now! Deploy the application and you will see a nice JasperReport being renered within the component!

mireport Developers Guide

19

3 HowTos
Here we have put several HowTos allowing you to use the report component more efciently.

3.1 Howto switch to between reports

Of course there will not be only a single report you want to display - you might have several .jasper FIles within your reports directory. And of course you want to switch between these reports during runtime. This is simple, you just need to change the reportFile Property and the new report will be tied in by the component: reportComponent.reportFile = "myreport.jasper"; or reportComponent.reportFile = "cherry.jasper"; or reportComponent.reportFile = "flower.jasper";

A whole Switch Report example might look like this: <local:Report id="reportComponent" x="37" y="31" databaseURL="jdbc:mysql://localhost/warehouse" databaseUser="root" databasePassword="" driver="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"

mireport Developers Guide

20

 host="http://localhost:7070/mireportUsage/" reportFile="myreport.jasper"> </local:Report> <s:Panel x="737.95" y="34.3" width="250" height="200" title="Adapt report"> <s:Label x="10" y="15" text="Select report"/> <mx:ComboBox id="cb_report" x="100" y="10" editable="true" width="140" change="{onReportChange()}"> <mx:dataProvider> <fx:Array> <fx:String>Coffee</fx:String> <fx:String>Cherry</fx:String> <fx:String>Flowers</fx:String> </fx:Array> </mx:dataProvider> </mx:ComboBox> </s:Panel> <fx:Script> <![CDATA[ private function onReportChange():void { if (cb_report.text == "Coffee") { reportComponent.reportFile = "myreport.jasper"; } if (cb_report.text == "Cherry") { reportComponent.reportFile = "cherry.jasper"; } if (cb_report.text == "Flowers") { reportComponent.reportFile = "flower.jasper"; } } ]]> </fx:Script>

3.2 HowTo set custom title and descriptive labels

There are several labels which can be adapted by you for example in order to present the title of the report currently being viewed. See the following gure to see the adaptive properties:

mireport Developers Guide

21

 Title text: reportTitle property Available Report Formats Text: descriptionText property Hint text: hintText property Whenever these properties change the report component will directly reect these changes. The following example gives you an idea on changing these properties: ... .. . <s:Label x="10" y="69" text="Set title"/> <s:Label x="10" y="99" text="Set left text"/> <s:TextInput x="100" y="59" width="140" id="txt_title"/> <s:TextInput x="100" y="90" width="140" id="txt_reportFormats"/> <s:Label x="10" y="133" text="Set hint text"/> <s:TextInput x="100" y="121" width="140" id="txt_hint"/> <s:Button x="173.05" y="151" label="Apply" width="67" click="onApply()"/> <mx:HRule x="10" y="43" width="230"/> <mx:HRule x="9" y="184" width="230"/> ... // apply text values... mireport Developers Guide 22

private function onApply():void { reportComponent.reportTitle = txt_title.text; reportComponent.descriptionText = txt_reportFormats.text; reportComponent.hintText = txt_hint.text; }

3.3 HowTo switch from portrait to landscape

Before we actually start explaining this simple property we have to chalk out again: its not about generating landscape or portrait reports! As you are familar with the iReport/Jasper backgrounds now, you will now that landscape and portrait report, both displaying the same data, result in two different .jasper les. And dynamic .jasper generation is not on our scope, so the property is only about component sizing. In the bottom of the mireport component there is a sheet button which enables to trigger these sizing actions by the user:

If the user presses the button the component width will be increased (920px width, 450px height, Landscape mode) or decreased (670px width, 450px height, Portrait mode).

mireport Developers Guide

23

If you want to deny access to these user triggered sizing activieties you can do so by setting the property displayLandscapePortraitSwitch to false, the icon wont be displayed then:

There is one more option regarding landscape/portrait mode, you can set the mode (=width of the component) on your own by setting the reportFormat property either to landscape or portrait: // landscape/portrait switch... private function onChangeFormat():void { if (rdg_format.selectedValue == "portrait") reportComponent.reportFormat = "portrait"; else reportComponent.reportFormat = "landscape"; } This is typically used when you take over control regarding width of the component, for example if you want to display a report and know exactly: this report is a landscape report, so I have to switch the component to landscape directly.

3.4 HowTo set a custom tooltip text for the landscape/portrait button
You can overwrite the default tooltip text for the landscape/portrait button by setting the protraitTooltipText or landscapeTooltipText property: // apply tooltips mireport Developers Guide 24

private function onApplyTooltips():void { reportComponent.portraitTooltipText = txt_portraitTooltip.text; reportComponent.landscapeTooltipText = txt_landscapeTooltip.text; }

See the results below:

4 Passing parameters
Of course static reports are boring (and useless) as you usually want to display data based on ltering for age, name...etc.. Our component allows you to pass in an arbitrary number of parameters from the client to the server which then will be used to query against the database.

4.1 Adding parameters within iReport

Lets start with an example: the report we previously used should match a lter criteria, ltering for the ID (sth. like SELECT * from items where ID > 30). Of course this is a pretty simple query but its enough to demonstrate how to work with parameters - and which/how many parameters you pass into you report query is completely up to you. Things start as usual within iReport, add a new paramter to your report within the design view: mireport Developers Guide 25

Next, select the paramter and adapt the parameter properties in the right hand property editor, as ID is an Integer value the parameter will be type Integer as well, name of the lter is idFilter. Finally the report query needs to be adapted, open the query editor and adapt the query as following:

The query should be something like this: Select * from item where itemId > $P{idFilter} You see, the newly added parameter is used within the report query, switch to the preview mode and iReport will prompt for a paramter value in order to test the query.

mireport Developers Guide

26

4.2 Passing paramters to the Flex component

Ok, the .jasper report now contains the information a paramtere called idFilter will be passed in. If you try to open the report within our report component openeing will fail gracefully since the required parameter is not passed in. So how to use the component in order to pass in parameters? In the client part of the application we have created a special datatype enabling you to pass exactly these lter parameters to the server. The problem: we somehow need to determine the datatype as 2345 either could be an Integer, Float or String value. Thats the reason the datatype provides adding methods for any datatype, lets have a look into the code to make things clearer: Adding an Integer parameter which matches ireport parameter called idFilter: // filter array - put your filters into this array var filters:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection(); // create key value pair matching exactly the JasperReport filter // property ("idFilter") // Integer filter var kv1:KeyValuePair = new KeyValuePair(); kv1.addIntegerPair("idFilter",(int)(txt_filterId.text)); filters.addItem(kv1); // apply filter to component (report will reoload immediately) reportComponent.reportfilters = filters;

Adding a String parameter: // create a 2nd filter // property ("descriptionFilter") // String filter var kv2:KeyValuePair = new KeyValuePair(); kv2.addStringPair("descriptionFilter",txt_filterDescription.text); filters.addItem(kv2); Adding a date parameter: // create a 3rd/4th filter // property ("nextDeliveryFilterMin")/("nextDeliveryFilterMax") // Date filter var kv3:KeyValuePair = new KeyValuePair(); kv3.addDatePair("nextDeliveryFilterMin",dat_min.selectedDate); filters.addItem(kv3); Adding Float parameter (datatype Number will always be translated to Java Float): // create a 5th filter // property ("quantityFilter") // Float filter var kv5:KeyValuePair = new KeyValuePair(); mireport Developers Guide 27

kv5.addNumberPair("quantityFilter",new Number(txt_filterQuantity.text)); filters.addItem(kv5); The lters are passed to the report and used for report generation. The corresponding JasperReport query could look like this: Select * from item where itemId > $P{idFilter} and itemDescription LIKE $P{descriptionFilter} and (nextDelivery between $P{nextDeliveryFilterMin} and $P{nextDeliveryFilterMax}) and itemQuantity > $P{quantityFilter} And the parameters are passed in via Flex frontend. Being honestly this seems to be little bit complex, but we suggest: simply start with a query containing single String lter and extend this example, as once understood passing lters is really easy and one of the most powerful features of mireport!

Take care: all lter parameters will be passed to the servlet via URL - which means to you that special attention to special characters! For example if you want to pass the % sign (often used in LIKE query lter parameters) to your report you have to pass %25 instead of using % only. To make things easier we just dropped a table below containing frequently used special characeters.

mireport Developers Guide

28

5 Advanced topics
5.1 Serverside le generation
As you might have noticed, JapserReport generates a physical le which needs to be placed somewhere on your server. We congured JasperReport to put this le in your report directory, we add a unique ID in order to make sure several reports can be used by several users. So the tricky point/question is: how to get rid of these les as the user usually requires these les only one time, The answer: we have implemented a pretty tricky le handling, for any le which is generated during a session (session in terms of one client being connected to the server) we put a little hint to the session. If the session terminates (server timeout, client inactivity) we read this information and start deleting the corresponding les. The only exception where the les might reside within the directory: you shut down the server as we have no chance to gather this information in this case. If this should happen you might have to clean the report directory manually. You could also write a batch job checkking any 24 hours for .pdf/.rtf/.xls les older than 24 hours and remove these...but we thought the session way is much easier for you;

6 Known Issues
There is a serious issues which occurs when using mireport with IE 7: the report is displayed once, as soon as the user clicks somewhere outside the report area the report disappears. This is a focus management problem which occurs when using the iFrame component, but there is a workaround in order to get rid of this begaviour: In your project (where you want to integrate the mireport component), open the index.template.html le, the le can be found within the html-template folder. Add the following snippet to one of the JavaScript sections starting with the <script> tag: function setBrowserFocus(){document.getElementById('${application}').focus();} The full script passage now should look like this (see red entry): <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- For version detection, set to min. required Flash Player version, or 0 (or 0.0.0), for no version detection. --> var swfVersionStr = "${version_major}.${version_minor}.${version_revision}"; <!-- To use express install, set to playerProductInstall.swf, otherwise the empty string. --> var xiSwfUrlStr = "${expressInstallSwf}"; var flashvars = {}; var params = {}; params.quality = "high"; params.bgcolor = "${bgcolor}"; params.allowscriptaccess = "sameDomain"; params.allowfullscreen = "true"; var attributes = {}; attributes.id = "${application}"; mireport Developers Guide 29

attributes.name = "${application}"; attributes.align = "middle"; swfobject.embedSWF( "${swf}.swf", "flashContent", "${width}", "${height}", swfVersionStr, xiSwfUrlStr, flashvars, params, attributes); <!-- JavaScript enabled so display the flashContent div in case it is not replaced with a swf object. --> swfobject.createCSS("#flashContent", "display:block;text-align:left;"); function

setBrowserFocus(){document.getElementById('${application}').focus();}
</script>

Last but not least you have to call this newly added method after your application has nished loading, for example triggered by a creationComplete Event: creationComplete="{ExternalInterface.call('setBrowserFocus');}"

Following these steps the IE issue will be resolved. Unfortunately we can not embed this routine to our component, otherwise we are stealing the focus from your application...

mireport Developers Guide

30