Home > Catalogs > Managing resources in a catalog > Defining the join relationships between tables
After tables have been added to a catalog, you can now use them to build reports. However, in your daily work, you may often be dealing with a set of tables in your queries. You will have to define relationships and create joins among different tables every time you create a new report. For XML data source, if the parent and children nodes are transformed to different tables, joins will be embodied by the parent-child relationship, which is maintained by primary key and foreign key in tables.
JReport Designer provides you with a pre-join feature. The pre-join information is one kind of resource information stored in the catalog. It is saved in a standalone file with the extension .pre, and shares the same prefix as the catalog file. It is not used at report runtime. In JReport Designer, when you open a catalog, the pre-join file is opened at the same time. When you save the catalog, the pre-join file is also saved.
The Pre-join Editor is a convenient tool for you to predefine the relationships among tables all at once.
To predefine joins among tables in a catalog, follow the steps below:
Once a join has been established, you can modify it at any time if required. To do this:
Note: You cannot make outer joins for XML data sources.
See also Join Options dialog for details about options in the dialog.
There are two kinds of join formats: SQL92 and Use'+'. With conventional joins, records that do not satisfy the join condition are eliminated from the result. An outer join preserves these records in the result and replaces the missing values with nulls. SQL syntax uses the left outer join if the records in the left side table are preserved and right outer join if the records on the right side table are preserved. The left side is determined by where the arrow begins and the right side is determined by the side the arrow points to. It is independent of the location of the table in the query editor. When you drag to make the join, you always drag logically from left to right even if your view in the query editor is right to left.
For example, consider the following two tables where the join arrow points from the Customer.C# to the Order.C#:
Table 1
Order | O# | C# |
---|---|---|
101 | 001 | |
102 | 002 | |
103 | 004 |
Table 2
Customer | C# | Name |
---|---|---|
001 | GE | |
002 | IBM | |
003 | DELL |
The inner join of Customer.C# = Order.C#
will produce the following result:
JoinResult | O# | C# | Name |
---|---|---|---|
101 | 001 | GE | |
102 | 002 | IBM |
The Customer LEFT JOIN Order ON (Customer.C# = Order.C#)
will produce the following result:
JoinResult | O# | C# | Name |
---|---|---|---|
101 | 001 | GE | |
102 | 002 | IBM | |
<null> | 003 | DELL |
The Customer RIGHT JOIN Order ON (Customer.C# = Order.C#)
will produce the following result:
JoinResult | O# | C# | Name |
---|---|---|---|
101 | 001 | GE | |
102 | 002 | IBM | |
103 | <null> | <null> |
The Customer FULL OUTER JOIN Order ON (customer.C# = order.C#)
will produce the following result:
JoinResult | O# | Order.C# | Customer.C# | Name |
---|---|---|---|---|
101 | 001 | 001 | GE | |
102 | 002 | 002 | IBM | |
<null> | <null> | 003 | DELL | |
103 | 004 | <null> | <null> |
After you have made joins among the tables in the Pre-join Editor window, you can then use them to define paths, which can be used for creating/editing queries and setting up joins in business cubes later.
To define a join path:
Notes:
After you have specified the paths, you can edit, delete and rename them as required. To do this, click the Paths button on the toolbar of the Pre-join Editor window to bring out the Save Pre-join Path dialog. See the dialog.
You can save the relationships by clicking OK on the Pre-join Editor toolbar. Note that the pre-join information won't really be saved to disk until you save the catalog. After you have saved the catalog, you can then use the just created pre-join to develop reports.
Notes: