Publish / report · All operations

Fill a report template designed elsewhere

A variant of Make a report

Run rows through a report definition made in a separate report designer and render the output.

Status

In arcform

Not built yet

arcform does not do this yet; it would live in Brightfield's view. Its place on the roadmap

What other tools call it

Meridian's classification; an independent blind rating agreed on 95.7% of 324 rows (variant, version 3).

KNIME Analytics Platform (1)
Pentaho Data Integration (1)
Talend (2)
  • tJasperOutputread 2026-09-27

    Render input rows as a report from a Jaspersoft iReport .jrxml template

  • tJasperOutputExecread 2026-09-27

    Read a source file and render it as a report from a Jaspersoft iReport .jrxml template

Background

The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project has two main components: a visual report designer and a runtime component for generating reports.[1] JasperReports, an open source Java reporting tool, defines reports in an XML format called JRXML, which can be hand-coded, generated or designed using a tool.[2] The Pentaho Reporting Output step renders a Pentaho Report Design file (.prpt), using a selected reporting engine type.[3]

When to use it

Reach for a designed template when a report's layout is fixed and drawn by someone in a report designer, and only the data changes from run to run. (Meridian's view)

In Talend, the columns of the tJasperOutput component's schema and those defined in the JasperReports JRXML template must match.[4] In Talend's tJasperOutput component, extra input columns are discarded and missing input columns are filled with null values.[4] Compare a template's field list with the incoming columns before trusting the first report it produces. (Meridian's view)

Pentaho's Reporting Output step can pass values from an input field to a report's parameter, if the report being generated supports parameters for input.[5] In Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), an output file named without a path in the Reporting Output step is created in the PDI client's home folder.[5][6]

The method

Teodor Danciu began work on JasperReports in June 2001, and JasperReports 0.1.5 was released on November 3, 2001.[2] A .jasper file is a compiled version of a .jrxml file, and the compilation can be done at runtime using the JasperCompileManager class.[2] Scriptlets written in Java may accompany a JasperReports report definition, with hooks invoked before or after stages of report generation such as Report, Page, Column or Group.[2]

The BIRT Project was first proposed and sponsored by Actuate Corporation, and became a top-level project within the Eclipse community on October 6, 2004.[1] BIRT report designs are persisted as XML and can access data sources including SQL databases, web services and XML.[1] KNIME's BIRT-based reporting extension generates reports with KNIME workflows as input, viewed in a web browser or exported as PDF, DOC, PPT or XLS.[7]

Pentaho Report Designer is a standalone client that serves as a front-end for jFree Reports, a sub-project integrated into Pentaho's framework for reporting.[6] In Pentaho's Reporting Output step, the output processor is the reporting engine used to generate the output file type, such as .pdf, .csv or .xml.[5]

Sources

  1. [1]BIRT Project - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]JasperReports - Wikipediasecondary source
  3. [3]Pentaho Reporting Output | 9.3 Data Integration | Pentahodocumentation
  4. [4]tJasperOutput | Talend Components for Jobs Helpdocumentation
  5. [5]General | 9.3 Data Integration | Pentahodocumentation
  6. [6]Pentaho - Wikipediasecondary source
  7. [7]KNIME Reporting Runtime (BIRT)documentation