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There are a few steps involved in developing a custom tool. These steps can be summarized as follows:

1. Developing a Tool Class
2. Creating an Extension Package

Developing a Tool Class

Developing a Tool class requires setting a class path to magicreport.jar. You can find magicreport.jar from the library folder under the Report Wizard plugin directory. The following sample shows the source code for Hello.java.

package mytool;
import com.nomagic.magicreport.engine.Tool;
public class HelloTool extends Tool
{
   public String getHello() {
      return "Hello World";
   }
   public String getHello(String name) {
      return "Hello " + name;
   }
}

The sample shows two methods following the getter concept defined by the JavaBean specification.

Creating an Extension Package

The extension package is delivered in a JAR file. JAR (Java ARchive) is a file format based on the popular ZIP file format and is used for aggregating many files into one. To create a JAR file, you can store *.class with the Java package folder structure in a ZIP file format or creating from a JAR tool.

To combine files into a JAR file (in this case), here is the sample code fragment:

jar cf MyTool.jar *.class

In this example, all the class files in the current directory are placed in the file named "MyTool.jar". A manifest file entry named META-INF/MANIFEST.MF is automatically generated by the JAR tool. The manifest file is the place where any meta-information about the archive is stored as named: Value pairs. Please refer to the JAR file specification for more details.

jar cf MyTool.jar mytool

The example above shows that all the class files in the directory mytool are placed in the file named "MyTool.jar".

A complete JAR tool tutorial can be found at:

• http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/deployment/jar/
• http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/windows/jar.html