September 2011 - RationalPlan

RationalPlan Version 3.24 Is Available With New Features

RationalPlan version 3.24 was just released. Many new features were added like the possibility to work with custom filters, to attach documents or to use rich text editors on tasks. More reports are available now in multiple languages and as a bonus a preview capability is also present. Another thing that deserves to be mentioned is the compatibility with the latest Java version 1.7.

RationalPlan is a project management software designed to fit multiple types of users starting from novices, those that need an alternative to Microsoft Project, users that need an environment to handle multiple projects and up to companies that need a server solution with concurrent access for multiple users. It has been developed to help project managers keep their projects on time and within budget.

Important changes added to this version:

Added support for custom filters
Support for multiple languages for reports
Added a new “Resource assignments” report
Added documents for tasks
Improved the functionality for managing conflicts
Added WYSIWYG rich text editor for the notes on tasks, resources, clients and risks
Added support for Java 7
Added the possibility to preview reports

The reporting mechanism was significantly improved from multiple points of view. The most important is the possibility to have a preview of each report before it is decided whether it will be printed or not. Next a new type of report was added: “Resource assignments”. This report is useful to generate the list of responsibilities for a certain resource. This way the project manager can hand over either digitally through .pdf files or manually through printed sheets the list of activities that each resource has to do. And all of these are now available in multiple languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Romanian.

Working with filters on tasks just got easier and at the same time more powerful. With the addition of custom filters users can now create any combination of the already existing ones. They will be able to see for example the tasks that are not completed and that are assigned to certain resource and that have a deadline.

The way users can manage documentation on tasks in the current version should be more helpful. They will have the possibility to attach documents as links to local files or to web pages over the Internet. More than that the Notes area was transformed in a rich text editor from a plain one. Users will be able now to format texts and add hyperlinks or images. The rich text editing was also extended to other data like resources, clients, risks etc.

Many more minor improvements were added like an easier way to manage conflicts, some cosmetic issues, better translation in other languages and so on. Support for the latest Java version 1.7 was also added.

RationalPlan suite includes:

RationalPlan Single Project – the alternative for Microsoft Project and the perfect solution for novice or accidental project managers
RationalPlan Multi Project – project management software for multiple projects, projects that are interconnected through dependencies and share common resource
RationalPlan Project Viewer – free project management software viewer, the solution for anyone (from project stakeholders to team workers) to view projects details
RationalPlan Project Server – a centralized place to manage the company’s projects while offering concurrent access to different users

RationalPlan Project Management Software is available at http://www.rationalplan.com. It can be download from https://www.rationalplan.com/download.php.

About Stand By Soft

Stand By Soft was founded in 1997 as a software company specialized in building desktop applications and components. RationalPlan is a project management software that follows the general recommended guidelines from project management domain. MOOS Project viewer is a Microsoft® Project viewer that allows you to open, view in a dynamic way and print any Microsoft® Project file

Contact name: Lucian Ioan
Address: Aleea Parului, Nr.4A, Craiova, Dolj, 200346, Romania
Email: marketing@rationalplan.com
Phone: +40771610710

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By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:12+00:00September 6th, 2011|News, Project Management Software, RationalPlan|Comments Off

JasperReports tutorial for JAVA using JasperViewer to preview reports

JasperViewer it is a very useful component which allows you to preview the reports from your application before saving them as documents. It also offers additional functionality like printing the reports, saving them with different extensions (ODT, HTML, DOC, PDF and others), navigating through out the report’s pages and zooming in or out. This was the perfect component for fulfilling the customers request here at RationalPlan because it was very easy and straightforward to use. The tricky part and also what I consider a drawback is that if you want to customize its appearance and functionality you can not do it.

First let us try using the viewer as it is without any customizations. The class that describes the viewer is JasperViewer. Looking at the API you can see that the constructors can receive three types of components: an InputStream, a JasperViewer or a String that describes the source file. Because we use a custom data source (click to see the tutorial) to fill our reports it was very simply for us to use the already generated JasperPrint object and pass it to the JasperViewer constructor.

[sourcecode language=”java”] JasperPrint print = JasperFillManager.fillReport(projectCalendarStream, hm, mainReportDS);
JReportsViewer jReportsViewer = new JReportsViewer(print);
jReportsViewer.viewReport(); [/sourcecode]

In the first line of code we created the JasperPrint component with the JasperFillManager and then we pass it to the constructor in order to create the report. The last line just shows up the JasperViewer dialog.

The next step is to create a customized version of the JasperViewer component to fulfill our needs. Let’s say we want to allow the users to save the reports only as a PDF document. Here is the source code for JasperReports.

[sourcecode language=”java”] public JReportsViewer(JasperPrint jasperPrint, boolean isExitOnClose, Locale locale) {
if (locale != null) {
setLocale(locale);
}
this.isExitOnClose = false;

initComponents();

this.viewer = new JRViewer(jasperPrint, locale);
List<JRSaveContributor> newSaveContributors = new LinkedList<JRSaveContributor>();
JRSaveContributor[] saveContributors = this.viewer.getSaveContributors();
for (int i = 0; i < saveContributors.length; i++) {
if (saveContributors[i] instanceof JRPdfSaveContributor) {
newSaveContributors.add(saveContributors[i]);
}
}
this.viewer.setSaveContributors(newSaveContributors.toArray(new JRSaveContributor[0]));
this.pnlMain.add(this.viewer, BorderLayout.CENTER);
}[/sourcecode]

This is one of the constructors that we kept because we use a JasperPrint object. We have deleted the other ones because we don’t use source files or InputStreams. As you can see inside this constructor we have a list of JRSaveContributors. These contributors represent the save extensions and as already mentioned we only want to keep the PDF format. To achieve this we look for the JRPdfSaveContributor and when we find it we add it to our list of contributors. Then we set this list as the new list of contributors.

This is a minor customization but if you want other complex ones you might need to take the source code, apply your changes, create the jar and then replace the original JasperReports jar with your own.

Hope this short tutorial helps. Good luck!

By Andrei Ticudeanu|2022-11-18T10:20:12+00:00September 5th, 2011|RationalPlan|Comments Off