Need to be able to generate “Issue” reports in various output formats

I would like to generate “Issue” reports in several different formats. The format would be based on project. Within the project, I would like to group the issues by priority then by the date that it was created.

I know you can change the “Issue Navigator” view to give a view of some of this information. The output can be put into an excel spreadsheet but the output is not what was displayed on the screen. Sure I can take this spreadsheet and modify it (drop columns and sort them) but I would really like to avoid doing that.

The documentation leads me to believe there is a way to do this using plugins. However, I need to know the basics on how do to this. This link: http://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=11465 tells you have to extend an Existing System Report. It states what files to edit, things to change, and to put the compiled version in a lib directory. However, I need more information as to edit this file “src/etc/atlassian_plugins.xml” and put it ${JIRAHOME}/wherever . Also, I need to know how to compile the module. Again just the basics …

This seems like it should be a rather simple thing to do – am I missing something?

Thanks for any help.

Note: I did send an email to : jira-support@atlassian.com on Tuesday and I have never heard back.