Multiple Jasper reports - Single request - jasper-reports

Question

I have a requirement,where I can select multiple records,and choose the action to generate zipped report with document each(pdf in my case) for each of the selected entries.
For example Employee1,Employee2,Employee3 would be selected,and when I choose to generate report,3 reports should be generated one each for the employee,and the output has to be zipped and downloaded.
For now what I do is generate the jasperPrint and export the report to ZipOutputstream with a new zipentry for each of the employee.
This means running the queries thrice and adding the outputstream to zip.
Is there a better way of doing it?

Answer 1

Your solution is normally the correct way, the alternatives are if you need to avoid multiple queries.
Load all you data in to a List<Employee> pass a new JRBeanCollectionDataSource(List<Employee>) for each Employee. (This decrease queries but increase memory usage).
If you have control of the pages (example 1 employee per page), you can generate 1 pdf with all employees and then use itext to split it in multiple pdf.
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader("nameOfReport.pdf");
int n = reader.getNumberOfPages();
int i = 0;
while ( i < n ) {
Document document = new Document(reader.getPageSizeWithRotation(1));
PdfCopy writer = new PdfCopy(document, new FileOutputStream("Employee_" + i + ".pdf"));
document.open();
PdfImportedPage page = writer.getImportedPage(reader, ++i);
writer.addPage(page);
document.close();
writer.close();
}