Developing a report without a view

In the previous recipe, we saw how to get the reports produced from a database view. It is a great way to get reports out quickly as all you have to do is provide a view that can feed data to ADempiere's report engine. It can also use the in-built layout to present the data in a well formatted form. However, when we start talking about having a customized report layout, reading data from multiple data sets (for example, views, joined tables, and so on), applying conversions and calculations on top of the data set, and so on, the view-based approach starts to look very limiting. In these cases, we will have to have our own custom layouts dealing with data sets and applying conversions and calculation. Moreover, this is going to be the focus of this recipe. We'll go through the end-to-end steps required to design a custom report and use it in ADempiere to present our data.

For simplicity, I have taken a very basic data set where I will create a report that...