Generating nice reports within the context of a Flex application is pretty easy - there are dozens of Charting libraries enabling you to create nice colored interactive charts. But all these libraries have a common pain point: you can not export the report data. Which means, presenting your quarterly results in a meeting fails gracefully or you have to fire up a Flex client. And if the controller asks you to send these results in order to use this data within his calculation you usually end up in populating clumsy Excel sheets and putting each value from the application to the Excel sheet...

Ok, there are LiveCycle Data Services, these will enable you to create magnificent reports by querying your database directly...this would be the Adobe answer, and as you know, LCDS is pretty expensive..so is there no way of creating PDF/Excel/RTF reports with Flex?

Basically there is not, at least there is nothing like an easy to use component which can be used to perform this task. Reason enough for us to create this component! In the backend we are using JasperReports, the frontend component can be embedded to Flex directly - see the component in action right here (dont pay attention to the primitive component layout used, focus on the component and layout of the component instead of the demo control panels...):

Flex 3 component Demo

Flex 4 component Demo (looks nicer, custom metal skin has been created)

We wont get into component details here, therefore we have created a Developer Guide which will give you all information regarding JasperReport, Flex and our component, please have a look into the guide it’s very detailed and even so you never used JasperReports/iReports before the guide will give you a good introduction.

There are two different distributions of the component available: one is a free distribution, this distribution is limited to PDF generation only, so you can not generate Word (rtf) and Excel (xls). If you want to generate Word and Excel as well (two more buttons in the menu bar) you have to purchase the component, pricing is 99$ (70€/105CHF) - simply drop a mail to sales@richability.com, we will send you the component as well as billing information.

The free component bundle can be downloaded right here, it’s available for Flex 4 and Flex 3:

mireport (Flex 3)

mireport (Flex 4)

Flex and Reporting is a MUST HAVE to any enterprise application. Without a clean reporting interface your whole application will end up in a workaround, so the result is a typical Flex workaround application. If you want to head for enterprise development instead of Flex workarounds you should have a closer look into our Flex Reporting component - as PDF, Word or Excel generation can be achieved easily without workarounds...

For any further questions contact us, have fun with Flex & Reporting - your richability team!