Demos Setup

What the demos are

The samples folder of the Aspose.Slides for JasperReports download has eight demo projects: charts, fonts, images, landscape, shapes, subreport, text and xmldatasource. They are standard JasperReports demos, changed to add a ppt build target that exports the filled report to PPT. The download contains no exported presentations; you create them by building a demo.

Change the exporter class before you build

As shipped, the demos' Java code uses com.aspose.slides.jasperreports.JRPptExporter, a class that the current jars do not contain, so the demos do not compile. In the demo’s application class (for example, ShapesApp.java in the shapes demo), replace JRPptExporter with ASPptExporter, the PPT exporter in the same package. The fonts demo imports the whole package, so only the class name in its code changes.

The demos also use JasperReports classes that later JasperReports versions removed, such as JExcelApiExporter and JRExporterParameter.FONT_MAP. With the change above, the demos compile as follows:

JasperReports version Demos that compile
5.5.1 all eight
5.5.2 and 6.4.0 charts, images, landscape, shapes and xmldatasource
6.16.0 charts

Build a demo

Each demo’s build.xml expects the folder layout of a JasperReports project: it compiles against ../../../build/classes and the jars in ../../../lib, relative to the demo folder.

  1. Copy the demo folder to demo/samples in your JasperReports project folder.
  2. Copy aspose.slides.jasperreports.library-xx.x.jar from the download’s lib subfolder that covers your JasperReports version to the lib folder of the JasperReports project. See Installing Aspose.Slides for JasperReports.
  3. Put the jar of your JasperReports version and the jars it depends on in the same lib folder. Besides the demo files, build.xml puts only build/classes and the jars under lib on the classpath, and build/classes holds JasperReports classes only after you compile JasperReports from source.
  4. The charts, subreport and text demos read the HSQLDB sample database of JasperReports (jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost), so start its server first, as described in samples/Readme.txt of the download. The other demos need no database.
  5. In the demo folder, compile the application, compile the report design, fill it, and export it to PPT:
ant javac
ant compile
ant fill
ant ppt

The ppt target writes the presentation next to the filled report, named after the report (for example, LandscapeReport.ppt).

Two demos need more than the steps above:

  • The images demo loads one picture from http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/jasperreports.png when it exports. That address now redirects to HTTPS, so the ppt step writes no presentation until you change the address to https:// in ImagesReport.jrxml. With JasperReports 6.4.0, exporting that picture fails even over HTTPS.
  • The xmldatasource report uses the Arial font. On a system without Arial, ant fill prints that the font “is not available to the JVM” and writes no filled report, so ant ppt has nothing to export. The build still reports success, so check the output of each step.
Integration with JasperServer