Introduction

You have successfully run the sample application that we provide with i-net Clear Reports. The following programmers introduction guides you through the four i-net Clear Reports parts, the reporting engine, the report-socket/report-servlet, the database connection layer, and the viewer component on the client side.

I-net Clear Reports consists of

1. ReportServlet (or JSP), or ReportSocket (or the interface EngineRenderData for a standalone application) to provide data to the presentation tier,
2. report engine component which renders report templates and fetch the data from the data tier by using the appropriate database class and report templates via the HTTP protocol.

Please click on the hyperlinks to see the associated examples.

The presentation, business and data tier may or may not exist on separate computers, each of them protected by a firewall. For example JSP and Servlet processing will normally be done on a WEB-Server outside of the secure zone. The ReportServlet running in the insecure zone can contact the report engine in the secured business zone by tunneling RMI requests through the firewall between the presentation and business tier. Additionally the data tier can also be protected.

Another extreme is that i-net Clear Reports, Java viewer and a simple Java database can run in the same process space as the Java report viewer bean. In this situation Java viewer and i-net Clear Reports and the Java class that provides the data build one ?fat? client to view report data. i-net Clear Reports fetches the report templates using HTTP URLs. This means that one can store report templates on any computer on the internet as well as on the local file system (file:///c:/report1.rpt for example).

With application servers that support HTTPS, for example Bea WebLogic 6.x report templates can also be fetched using the secure HTTPS protocol. Databases can be changed at run-time by changing the request parameters (dll=…, host=… etc). i-net Clear Reports currently supports most native databases via JDBC drivers (Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase, IBM, and others) and ODBC with the JDBC/ODBC bridge. Servlets / JSP as well as a standalone applications written by you can also request page data in a specific format (currently PDF, HTML and RTF) from the engine running in the secure business tier.

The Java viewer bean can be used to print reports on the client-side and, running in the business tier can print reports on the server-side.