Jaspersoft Interview Questions and Answers

1. Jaspersoft Characteristics

2. What is Jaspersoft?

Jaspersoft is a commercial open source software vendor focused on business intelligence, including data visualization, reporting, and analytics. Jaspersoft provides commercial and open source software, support, services, and licensing around the JasperReports, JasperReports Server, Jaspersoft Studio, iReport, and Jaspersoft ETL products. Jaspersoft’s main related product is JasperReports Server, a Java web application that provides advanced report server capabilities such as report scheduling, permissions, ad hoc reporting, dashboards, and multi-tenancy.

It is offered in a community open source edition as well as under several commercial editions with broad support for various databases and data sources, including NoSQL and other big data sources.

3. What are the main features of Jaspersoft?

Pixel Perfect Reporting

• Highly formatted reports containing interactive charts, images, sub-reports, expressions, and more.
• Reports from any data source including JDBC, XML, CSV, Hibernate, POJO.
• Reports published in PDF, XML, HTML, CSV, DOC, ODT.

Ad Hoc Reporting

• Web-based, drag-and-drop report designer.
• Crosstabs, tables, and chart-based reports.
• Semantic layer against relational or non-relational data sources.

Advanced analytic functions

• Ability to analyze data across multiple attributes and time periods.
• Multidimensional Expression Language (MDX) support lets users run complex analytic queries.
• Addition of calculations at runtime or within the relational OLAP model.

Interactive user interface

• Intuitive web-based interface lets users drill down, drill across, drill up, filter, pivot, sort, and chart.
• Ability to use MS Excel as a front-end client to your OLAP environment.
• Granular security access down to the cell and column level.

Performance and scalability

• Sophisticated caching of data and dimensions reduces query latency.
• Relational database storage architecture.
• Aggregate-aware architecture simplifies setup and improves user response times.

Graphical design environment

• Business-oriented models for early design collaboration.
• Drag-and-drop process designer.
• Activity monitoring console tracks job execution and performance.

Connectors

• Native connectivity to ERP and CRM applications such as Salesforce.com, SAP, and SugarCRM.
• Support for mainframe, transactional, and analytic databases.
• Connectivity to Hive for Hadoop environments.

ELT support

• ELT connector support for Oracle, DB2, Postgres, IBM/Netezza, EMC/Greenplum, Teradata, and SAP/Sybase IQ.
• Merge, filter and rollback functions.
• ELT template jobs for re-use.

4. What is the use of Jaspersoft?

Jaspersoft empowers people every day to make better decisions faster by bringing them timely, actionable data inside their apps and business processes. Its embeddable, cost-effective reporting and analytics platform allows anyone to quickly self-serve to get the answers they need, while scaling architecturally and economically to reach everyone.

Thanks to a community that is hundreds-of-thousands strong jaspersoft’s commercial and open source software has been downloaded millions of times and is used to create the Intelligence Inside apps and business processes.

5. What is JasperReport?

JasperReports is an open source Javareporting tool that can write to a variety of targets, such as: screen, a printer, intoPDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, Comma-separated values or XML files.It can be used in Java-enabled applications, including Java EE or web applications, to generate dynamic content. It reads its instructions from an XML or .jasper file.Features of Jaspersoft Report:JasperReports is an open source reporting library that can be embedded into any Java application. Features include:

• Scriptlets may accompany the report definition, which the report definition can invoke at any point to perform additional processing. The scriptlet is built using Java, and has many hooks that can be invoked before or after stages of the report generation, such as Report, Page, Column or Group.

• Sub-reports

For users with more sophisticated report management requirements, reports designed for JasperReports can be easily imported into the JasperServer – the interactive report server.

6. What is iReport?

iReport is the free, open source report designer for JasperReports and JasperReports Server. Create very sophisticated layouts containing charts, images, subreports, crosstabs and much more. Access your data through JDBC, TableModels, JavaBeans, XML, Hibernate, CSV, and custom sources. Then publish your reports as PDF, RTF, XML, XLS, CSV, HTML, XHTML, text, DOCX, or OpenOffice.

7. What is the difference between JasperReports Server Community Edition and JasperReports Server Professional?

JasperReports Server Community Edition is Jaspersoft’s free, open source reporting and analysis server, based on JasperReports Library, Mondrian, JPivot and Spring. It is licensed under the GPLv2. JasperReports Server Professional Edition is a commercially licensed reporting and analysis server based on JasperReports Server Community Edition. It is “visible” source – code comes with Professional Edition, but it is not free. The Professional Edition extensions beyond the Community Edition include:

• Interactive web based “ad hoc” report development and data exploration (AJAX) against any data source.

• End user query through the browser, based on “data domains” which include data level security. A web based domain designer is provided. JDBC only at this stage.

• In-memory data access and calculation engine to support ad hoc. Includes server management like query governing.

• Dashboards made up of multiple reports, images and external web content can be designed through the browser (AJAX).

• User profile based data level security for OLAP analysis, beyond simple roles.

• Performance tuning and management tools.

• Multi-tenant enabled to support “business intelligence as a service” for SaaS vendors and organizations that share JasperReports Server across customers or departments.

• Complete translations of the JasperReports Server user interface and documentation for English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese (Chinese coming soon)

• Out of the box support to allow JasperReports Server to run in a large variety of application servers and databases for the repository. JasperReports Server Community Edition and Professional Edition can connect to a wide variety of databases for reporting and analysis through JDBC.

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8. What is the use of Jasper Report?

Jasper Reports is used to generate the reports from the Database. A powerful report-generating tool that has the ability to deliver rich content onto the screen, to the printer or into PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV and XML files. Its main use is to help creating page oriented, ready to print documents in a simple flexible manner.

9. What is iReport Designer?

There are several ways to add reporting capabilities to an application. For many web developers, to create a report just means to create a web page, which produces good results on screen but poor results when printed to paper. And to create a report in PDF means write more code tons of code, making the reports hard to maintain and long to write. When working with other technologies the problem does not change very much.

For example, Java provides an extensive API for printing, but there is still a lot of work to write specific code for each document format.The answer to this problem is to use a reporting library. JasperReports Library is the world’s most popular open source Java reporting library, and iReport Designer is a visual report designer for JasperReports. The library is a report engine that can be integrated in your open or commercial application to generate the reports designed with iReport Designer, display them on screen or export them in a final format like PDF, OpenOffice, DOCX and many others.

Alternatively, you can stream the result through a web application or send the final document directly to a printer. JasperReports is in some way the core of iReport Designer.JasperReports is extremely easy to integrate in an Java application, but if you need an environment to use the reports without having to write a custom application, you may consider using

JasperReports Server.JasperServer provides a web based interface to manage, schedule, and run the reports; a repository to store all the report resources like images, fonts, data sources and much more; a security service to decide who can execute which report; and a web services API to execute the reports from external applications (so you can generate reports from any kind of environment, like PHP or .NET).

In the big picture, iReport Designer allows you to design reports, JasperReports allows to execute them and generate output in a Java application, and JasperServer allows both end users and external applications to access, view, and publish your reports securely. JasperServer also makes reports interactive by adding drill down and drill up capabilities to your documents.

10. What is Jaspersoft ETL?

Jaspersoft ETL is a complete and ready-to-run ETL job designer with an extensive set of data integration capabilities. It consistently and accurately extracts and transforms data from multiple systems and loads it into data stores optimized for reporting and analysis such as star or snowflake schema data marts and warehouses. And it easily keeps pace with the performance of other leading ETL tools. With JasperETL, database architects and operational data store administrators can:

• Use the business modeler to access a non-technical view of the information workflow.
• Display and edit the ETL process with Job Designer, a graphical editing tool.
• Define complex mappings and transformations with Transformation Mapper and other transformation components.
• Generate portable Perl or Java code that can be executed on any machine.
• Track ETL statistics from start to finish with real-time debugging.
• Allow simultaneous output from and input to multiple sources including flat files, XML files, databases, web services, POP and FTP servers with hundreds of available connectors.
• Configure heterogeneous data sources and complex file formats including positional, delimited, CSV, RegExp, XML, and LDIF with metadata wizards.
• Use the Activity Monitoring Console (AMC) to monitor job events (successes, failures, warnings, etc.), execution times, and data volumes.

11. Who are the customers of Jaspersoft?

The Jaspersoft’s customers come mainly from the ISV sector. But basically the companies that creates their own application. So a very wide range of organizations is there, even from the public sector.

Creating Dashboards and Reports is basically what customers do with Jaspersoft software. Those are static reports or interactive HTML5 charts. The reports and dashboards can be accessed from any mobile device, which provides a neat overview.  You also have the option to get a deep analytical view.

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