Reporting technology – JasperReports
What is Jasper Reports?
JasperReports is a report-creation library intended to help you create page-like documents in the following formats:
- RTF
- XML
- XLS
- CSV
- HTML
- XHTML
- TEXT
- DOCX
- OpenOffice
You can access these files through JDBC, TableModels, JavaBeans, XML, Hibernate CSV among others. Formatting and rendering of these files does not require third-party or external tools, but JasperSoftStudio is often used to allow access to different data sources and to make reports dynamic.
JasperSoft Studio
JasperSoftStudio is a complete open source platform that adds new BI functionality to Java Eclipse capabilities, along with the ability to create, secure and share BI reports for free, without the need to purchase commercial software. The possibility of sharing is given by the integrated server for reports: JasperReportsServer. Finally, the data sources can be both databases and flat files.
Installing
Installing JasperReports
Being a library and not a stand-alone application, it must be embedded in a Java client or server application with all its functionalities gathered in the same JAR file. To facilitate the installation, you can use plugins such as JasperReportMaven Plugin.
Once JasperReports is downloaded, ApacheAnt will be used to compile and build the JARs.
For its use, bear in mind that there must be a report for each database query, although a blank file can be created to embed the data in it at a later point.
JasperReports Server
For the installation of JasperReportsServer, there are several installers depending on the operating system, always indicating the paths, ports, and users and passwords.
There is also the possibility of installing and deploying an already-dockerized JasperReportsServer, copying the JS Server file inside the “resources” folder. This option gives architects the flexibility to modify the scripts to create the Docker containers.
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