Advertising Demo

This report shows a typical advertising letter praising the latest offerings from a local computer store. It is a variation of the 'invoice' type demos.

The report definition uses a message-field tag to concat strings within an element.

    <message-field name="customer.salutationExpression"
    x="0" y="290" width="450" height="12"
    alignment="left" fontstyle="plain" fontsize="11"
    >Dear $("customer.salutation") $("customer.lastName")</message-field>
  

A message field will print the current values for the given datarow column names whenever the underlying band is printed. As the implementation uses a java.text.MessageFormat object to actually generate the contents for the element, you can also add additional message format arguments:

  <message-field name="invoice.date"
  x="75%" y="224" width="25%" height="12"
  alignment="right" fontstyle="plain"
  >$("ad.date",date,"yyyy-MM-dd")</message-field>

If the article description is empty, it is hidden using a custom function. As usual in such cases, the element to be hidden is referenced by its name.