CHAPTER 10

Reporting

In most projects, reporting is something that is overlooked until the last minute. Everyone is focused on getting information into the system and making the views look and feel right. Then someone starts using the application and says, "Wouldn't it be good if users could print out a copy of the information to take with them and refer to throughout their day?" "Oops, we didn't think about that." (Insert chirping crickets here.)

It makes sense that users would want to take their to-do information with them. But you're in a hurry and want to get this application rolled out quickly. What do you do?

In this chapter, you will learn how to create a reporting facility using the Collab-Todo domain and a popular open source reporting engine, JasperReports.¹ Creating a reporting facility will give you a slightly different view of Grails. You will use dynamic invocation to retrieve data for the report and pass the data to JasperReports. Along the way, you will see how easy it is to use third-party libraries in a Grails application.