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