The following screenshot of JasperAssistant presents the main parts of the designer's visual interface:
Design Editor window is the central part of the designer's user interface. Report
layout can be edited within this window and then previewed using the Preview Viewer
(Section 5.4, “Preview Viewer”). For reports that contain Crosstab
objects, additional editor tabs are available in the top part of the editor.
These tabs allow to edit the layout of each Crosstab
object
in a dedicated crosstab design editor.
The report layout is presented as a stack of report bands. Each band can contain report objects that are added by using the Palette View (Section 5.3, “Palette”). A band can be resized by dragging its handle (blue dashed line) located at band's bottom.
The crosstab layout is presented as a matrix of crosstab cells. Each cell on its turn can contain report objects, just like report bands. A cell can be resized by dragging its handles located at cell's bottom and right.
A report object can be selected by clicking inside its bounding box. Multiple objects can be selected by dragging the selection outline rectangle or using the Ctrl-click combination. There are two types of selection:
Primary Selection
And secondary selection
Report object can be resized by dragging the handles of the selection box. Dragging the object changes its position.
Image
, Text Field
and Static
Text
objects can be double-clicked to invoke the expression or text editor dialog.
Right-clicking a report object invokes its context menu. For more information see Section 5.11, “Menus”.
To simplify the creation of report layout, grid and snap to grid functions can be activated (Section 5.11, “Menus”).