With Konkret doing so well it was time for another utility. Alexander has created a cool web 2.0 utility for Playing With Wire. It’s called Cuzimatter and allows you to create ‘digg this’, ‘add to del.icio.us’ and ‘add to blinklist’ links. These can then be added to your blog entries to promote exposure for your coolest work. Start creating your links here.
I had a field like so,
$F{image_blob}
which I was converting to an image by treating the field as an InputStream and then feeding it to an image object. However, I started getting class cast exceptions suddenly.
Turns out that after editing the report query I had reread the fields from the database and Jasper had ‘forgotten’ about the fact that $F{image_blob} was an InputStream, and it was treating it as an Object. Editing the field and changing it back to InputStream solved the problem.
I was creating a complicated report with a subreport and only a single detail section. For some reason I kept getting an empty page at the end of the report.
I tried everything described in this bug report. Most importantly I set all hidden bands to display only if Boolean.FALSE (i.e. never).
That didn’t do it but might have helped. Eventually I went into the Report Properties and found a setting called ‘Print Order’ in the More… section. I have no idea what it does, but changing it to ‘Horizontal’ removed the extra page.
This was done using iReport 1.2.7.
Update 1: This is the weirdest thing. I had to change the setting back to ‘Vertical’ instead of ‘Horizontal’ in order to allow bands to split (saw this in this forum post). But when I did the extra page did not reappear after all. So maybe the horizontal vs vertical was not the problem.
It’s worth noting that I re-enabled the page footer band and gave it some space previously. Maybe the empty/0 height page footer was generating the extra page.
In order to create a table in Jasper Report’s iReport I wanted to draw a box from the top left corner of the group header, accross the detail section, to the bottom right of the group footer. After a few attempts I believe this is impossible and I am recording that here in case someone else is searching the internet for multi-band graphics in iReports. Anyone know how?
My only resort was to draw the box by hand using line segments, and to create a new line segment per band.
In the last day, the dice roller program Konkret rolled roll number 50,000! The little dice export program is becoming quite popular for its niche. It’s not the Norwinter servers are being stormed by eager dice rollers, but the number is still pretty dang massive. As of this writing, Konkret is number 11 on Google if you search for ‘dice roller’. That means just one spot away from the first page! Maybe there’ll be a massive increase in users when Konkret hits the first page. We’ll see.
This video tutorial does a pretty good job of explaining it:
Here’s the basic idea:
MASTER_ID and $F{id}.MASTER_ID.Now you can use $P{MASTER_ID} to refer to the id of the master report or whatever. I used it to make my SQL statement for the subreport.
Interactive fiction is a kind of interactive text roleplaying game, something I have always found a bit fascinating. For a long time, Graham Nelson’s Inform was the state of the art for creating these things. Of course, there wasn’t a lot going on in that field since text games are kinda passe, and I myself thought that Inform was dead too. Just going its job as well as always, but the last improvement in the field.
Turns out I was wrong. Inform 7 has now been released. To write an interactive fiction game in this version you actually work with natural language in the background. You write stuff like, ‘West-wing is a room.’ and the places appear in the game.
Pretty cool. In related news Slashdot has something up about another new Interactive Fiction invention here.
Alexander has banded together with his friend of many years, Viktor Petersson, to create a new internet startup. You may read about its development at the Playing With Wire blog.
We didn’t have a lot of stuff to put here on Norwinter.com. Currently, Olov is spending most of his days in San Francisco working through tough classes at the Academy of Art University. The current gig is a roto scoping project involving Planet of the Apes and featuring the awe inspiring acting of Alexander.
Speaking of Alexander, he is buried in work with a couple of university classes sprinkled on top. What a life.
Alright. As mostly Konkret users noticed, the website went down over the weekend again. The server began crashing intermittently and nobody knew why so we did the only right thing. We switched to a new server. So in the future all these mysteriously-disappeared-Norwinter problems will be gone, hopefully!
P.S.
Expect some additional downtime as we perform minor upgrades to the new server. They shouldn’t be long.
