JasperReports 3.5 for Java Developers

XML datasources

JasperReports allows us to use any well formatted XML document as a datasource. JasperReports uses XPath expressions to traverse the XML documents and extract the data for the report.

Note

XPath is a language used to navigate through an XML document's attributes and elements. More information about XPath can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.

For our next example, we'll need an XML file from which we'll read the data. The following XML document will serve this purpose:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <AircraftData> <aircraft> <tail_num>N263Y</tail_num> <aircraft_serial>T-11</aircraft_serial> <aircraft_model>39 ROSCOE TRNR RACER</aircraft_model> <engine_model>R1830 SERIES</engine_model> </aircraft> <aircraft> <tail_num>N4087X</tail_num> ...