Report Sections in JasperReports

By: MakeItSimple. in Java Tutorials on 2008-09-02

When building a report design we need to define the content and the layout of its sections. The entire structure of the report design is based on the following sections:

<background>,
<title>, <pageHeader>, <columnHeader>, <groupHeader>,
<detail>, <groupFooter>, <columnFoter>, <pageFooter>,
<lastPageFooter>, <summary>

Sections are portions of the report that have a specified height and width and can contain report objects like lines, rectangles, images or text fields.

When declaring the content and layout of a report section in an XML report design we use the generic element <band>.

This is how a page header declaration should look. It contains only a line object and a static text:

<pageHeader>
  <band height="30">
    <rectangle>
      <reportElement x="0" y="0" width="555" height="25"/>
      <graphicElement/>
    </rectangle>
    <staticText>
      <reportElement x="0" y="0" width="555" height="25"/>
      <textElement textAlignment="Center">
        <font fontName="Helvetica" size="18"/>
      </textElement>
      <text>Northwind Order List</text>
    </staticText>
  </band>
</pageHeader>

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