Recent releases of JasperReports include report styles, which make this a bit easier – you no longer have to create the rectangle.

I use iReport to create my styles – there is a “styles” pane that by default is docked with the “Library” pane. If you make it visible you can create a new style in the styles library. In the screen that pops up give the style a name (say “EvenOddRowStyle” and press “Add” under “Style Conditions”. Use one of the expressions that Brian gave and press Apply. and in the “Common” section press the “…” button next to “Backcolor” and pick the background color you want. Finally, when done with your report apply that style to all the fields in the rows you want to highlight. Just drag the style from the styles pane onto the field.

-Barry

As the code fragment doesn’t come, I uploaded it to our server: beta.lutumtappert.de/temp/code.png

The following image shows what I want to achieve:
beta.lutumtappert.de/temp/sample.gif
Thanks
-Thomas

My solution:
I created a scriptlet that has a method that takes a color value and creates a small colored image and returns it. Embedded into an image tag, I get my small color boxes in front of each line.
-Thomas

The style option is definately more elegant, worked fine for me, the only problem with it is that it only styles the cells, so unless you expand your cells in the band so there is no space between them, then the white of the band shows through in the gaps. I hate to say it but using the rectangles is easier for the overall end result. I wish you could just apply the style to the band.
~R

Nice solution. Just thought I’d mention that you’re needlessly creating a bunch of Boolean objects though. You can do the following to avoid that:

Boolean.valueOf( $V{PAGE_COUNT}.intValue() % 2 == 0 )

Hi Brian,

firstly, let me thank you for the hint on how to use a different color on odd and even rows! I tried your solution and it immediatly worked for me with exporting to PDF. I wanted to use the same thing in XLS but my rows did not get colored, so I was wondering if I might do something wrong like PROPERTY_WHITE_PAGE_BACKGROUND or something like that for Excel exporting. In the end I read the comment from Barry which finally helped me also getting the feature in XLS export while defining a new style with the condition expression

Boolean.valueOf( $V{PAGE_COUNT}.intValue() % 2 == 0 )

on it without using a rectangle and a print when expression on it!
Thanks again guys, this went immediatly into my own FAQ for designing JasperReports.

Bze,
WeAzLe

way to print this element.

I’m using iReport and I need to have the background of a table cell change dynamically based on a field color – how can I do that? I don’t see the ability to enter an expression for the background property. If not possible via the editor, can I edit the xml manually to do it? – I’m not sure if the background color is configurable with expression. Thanks in advance for your help.

wiphillyFan, I am currently doing the same thing with crosstabs. I add a style and assign this style to the crosstab “Detail/Detail” cell. I also change this cell to opaque. (You can link the style to any iReport element. I am just using the Detail/Detail cell as an example.) The style has a conditional expression so that it displays a particular background colour only when the condition is true. The conditional style is based on $V{valueMeasure}, which is the variable representing the value of each table cell in the “Detail/Detail” cell of crosstabs. See the example below for the jrxml code for the style.

<![CDATA[(($V{valueMeasure}.intValue())

Hello,
I used Jasper report having some problem.
Actually i want to show two dynamic table with number of rows changes every time. for that i required two detail section in Jasper design page,but there is no two columnHeader section.
how to solve this problem.If any one have solution then kindly inform me my id(vipul@thebigwhale.com)