Roughly speaking, for Oracle Forms customers with a valid support contract, Oracle Analytics Publisher (nowadays called Analytics Publisher) is part of the Forms/Reports FMW license.

If you like to use them outside the Forms ecosystem, you have to purchase a license via BI Suite or as a standalone component. Jaspersoft is basically an open source tool without any license fees. You can purchase a support contract for error handling and maintenance.

Beside Oracle Analytics Publisher, Jaspersoft provides different editions with diverse functionalities. Out of our experience the Community Edition (open source) of Jaspersoft covers all functionalities you got with Oracle Reports as well. The most complex edition is a full BI Solution comparable to Oracle´s BI Suite.

The functionality of the Community Edition covers the possibilities of Oracle Reports, but has less functionalities than the Oracle BI Publisher. Oracle BI Publisher provides features like self-service portals, reusable data models, multiple delivery channels, etc. If you need those functionalities you can consider the commercial version of JasperReports that has more features and is similar to BI Publisher. If you need more information, request our whitepaper “JasperReports vs Oracle BI Publisher” at customerservice@pitss.com

Three things to keep in mind:

• Migration is a project and you should treat it seriously. It’s not only a click on a button and runs next to the daily work

• Take the chance to improve your reporting landscape. Jaspersoft provides concepts of reusability that aren’t available for Oracle Reports. Harmonizing the layout, consolidating queries and functions increases the maintainability afterwards

• Destress yourself and run a fine grained stage approach. You can migrate and deploy one Report after the other, because the customer cannot figure out if the PDF comes from Jaspersoft or Oracle Reports

Yes, that is our “WHY”, so the reason why we do it.

Our product addresses the three most important issues during a migration:

1.) #SimplifyComplexity: Finding patterns in 1000 of Reports, proof assumptions of all code fragments before deciding on a new direction, show and follow global dependencies that aren’t calculatable for a developer

2.) #LegacyCodeMatters: If you start to develop from scratch, you may miss requirements, fail during implementation of complex queries and functions and face a huge test effort. Taking care of the existing code base as a baseline or springboard, reduces the risk and effort.

3.) #DontRepeateYourself: However, you develop and will reach a point where you step into repeatable actions. That is a point where our product supports generation capabilities that could be highly customized.

That depends on the complexity of the existing Report. We saw implementations with dozens of queries, nearly infinite loops of repeating frames and thousands of LOC inside functions.

In some cases, not only the amount of objects derives the effort of finalizing the Report. The question is if the existing code (and requirements) addresses an existing solution in Jaspersoft or not. As an example – DML inside a format trigger is easy in Oracle Reports, but it’s not a good idea in Jaspersoft.

Before you even calculate your project, our product can easily calculate the effort and obstacles of the migration, based exactly on your sources. Check it out!

Theoretically speaking yes – you could also deploy Jasper Server on WLS, but I haven’t seen any customer doing it yet. With a lightweight WebServer, the administration overhead is even smaller than with a WLS instance. Beside starting and stopping the managed server there aren’t any benefits for this infrastructure, isn’t it?

Yes – you could run Jasper also from command line

The typical starting point is: Tomcat with Jaspersoft Server, Jaspersoft Server in open-source community edition, integrate via WebService. Time Frame depends on the complexity of your reports

Yes!

From the Jaspersoft Server User Guide: “A Jaspersoft Dashboard displays several reports in a single, integrated view. A dashboard can include other dashboards, input controls for choosing the data displayed in one or more frames, and custom frames that point to URLs for other content. By combining different types of related content, you can create appealing, data-rich dashboards that quickly convey trends.”

I take a 5 day training and I’m able to migrate the simple reports. My colleague, which are more familiar, have a very cool learning curve and after 2-3 month they are ready to take the biggest one. It’s importent to train on the job and start with the easy once.

Use setup database connections via JDBC inside the IDE. The report reference to the name of the db-connection, which could differ from IDE to test and production environment.

We don’t cover matrix reports by now (matter of not realy used by the customers so far) and we advise to redo graphics, because they are cool in Jaspersoft and fast to setup.

That is typically a task for a java post processing implementation. There is no out-of-the box solution in the Jaspersoft server, but this could be easily enhanced.

Yes – in the query and within the scriplets.

There is no APEX internal reporting tool available. You could use the export functionalities of Interactive Grids. Oracle tend to integrate AOP.

If you cover the functionalities from Oracle Reports the „basics“ in Community and Pro are enough and the same. There are some addons in the Pro, which enhance the functionality (e.g. customizable Dashboards, etc.) but we do not rely on this in the migration. Most of our customer use the community edition.

Yes – you could integrate this via WebServices and Web.Show_Document features in Oracle Forms.

Oracle Analytics Publisher provides three different ways to create a layout for a designed data model:

1.) There is a webbased online design tool for simple reports. It’s easy to use but with limited functionalities.

2.) Microsoft Word. With this you create a RTF Template in the way you create classic form letters in Word.

3.) Direct writing of XSL without an IDE.
From the developer point of view, none of them is an IDE like Oracle Reports developer or Eclipse.

There are different downloads on the Jasper WebSite. There is a community edition and a pro edition available.

You could integrate Jaspersoft as a Java-class in your application or you could use the Jaspersoft server. This is usualy deployed on a lightweight server like TomCat or in Forms environment also on a WLS.

Jaspersoft typically provide two different ways of integration. On one hand you can use the Jaspersoft Javaclasses and embedding them into a Javabased application. With the API you could run the reports. On the other hand you could use the Jaspersoft Server and communicate with them via webservices.

Jaspersoft Dashboards are a functionality of the Server and you could configer them directly in the WebUI of the server.

JasperReports Dashboards are a functionality of the Server and you could configer them directly in the WebUI of the server.

Yes, you could also create reports like invoices, pay checks, etc. with Jaspersoft.

Yes, try our Reports2Jasper Modeler!

Jaspersoft provides different versions (community, professional, etc.) which have different licence costs. The community edition is the only free version of those you mentioned. Oracle Analytics Publisher and OAC are not free and need a licence of the server or the cloud offerings. If you like to discuss other reports solution (BIRT, AOP, PLPDF, etc.) or if you are interested in any kind of licence, please get in contact with sales@pitss.com

The answer could be given in two levels of complexity. If reporting is very easy, like a tab report of a query, you could use export functionality of an APEX grid. This allows you to create HTML, Excel or PDF Formats which could slightly be customized.

If reporting is getting more complex and see a lot of implementation in Oracle Reports, you should consider a separate solution. Preferred frameworks are Jaspersoft, Oracle Analytics Publisher or AOP.

Yes, Jaspersoft will also support hyperlinks to drill.