TableModels as datasources

In many client-side applications, data is displayed in tabular format. A common requirement in many applications is to allow the user to print this tabular format as a report.

JasperReports provides an implementation of the JRDataSource interface that makes the task of generating reports from tabular format trivial for Swing applications. The class in question is net.sf.jasperreports.engine.data.JRTableModelDataSource. This class takes a javax.swing.table.TableModel as its only parameter. Because tables in Swing are populated through TableModels, all we need to do for generating a report from a table is to pass the appropriate table's TableModel as a parameter. The following example is a simple but complete Swing application demonstrating this process:

package net.ensode.jasperbook;

import java.awt.BorderLayout;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.util.HashMap;

import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame...