Now that you have built a report using the Pentaho Reporting XML format, it's time to learn how to do a similar exercise, by building a report using Pentaho Reporting Java API. To avoid going over the entire Javadoc of Pentaho Reporting, this chapter covers only the essentials. This includes references to important packages, making it easier to find the classes, factories, and interfaces that you need to build your report. Pentaho Reporting's Javadoc is available at http://javadoc.pentaho.com/reporting/.

The first step in working with Pentaho Reporting's API is to initialize the reporting engine and create an empty MasterReport object:

// Initialize the reporting engine
ClassicEngineBoot.getInstance().start();

// Create a report object
MasterReport report = new MasterReport();

The ClassicEngineBoot and MasterReport...