JasperReports is an open source Java reporting tool that can write to screen, to a printer or into PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, Comma-separated values and XML files.

It can be used in Java-enabled applications, including J2EE or Web applications, to generate dynamic content. It reads its instructions from an XML or .jasper file.

Features

JasperReports is an open source reporting library that can be embedded into any Java application. Features include:

Outputting to PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, CSV and XML files. The engine allows report definitions to include charts, with the rendering provided by the JFreeChart library which supports many chart layouts, such as Pie, Bar, Stacked Bar, Line, Area, Scatter Plot, Bubble, and Time series.

Multiple sources can be merged together. The data can be retrieved from defined data sources such as JDBC, CALS Table Models, JavaBeans, EJBQL, XML, Hibernate, and Comma-separated values, and extra data sources can be added to the JasperReports framework by plugging in a custom JRQueryExecuter. An extension is available to use Oracle PL/SQL stored procedures as a data source.

Scriptlets may accompany the report definition, which the report definition can invoke at any point to perform extra processing. The scriptlet is built using Java, and has many hooks that can be invoked before or after stages of the report generation, such as Report, Page, Column or Group.

Sub-reports

For users with more sophisticated report management requirements, reports designed for JasperReports can be easily imported into the JasperServer - the interactive report server.

JasperSoft

Teodor Danciu began work on JasperReports in June 2001, the sf.net project was registered in September 2001 and JasperReports 0.1.5 was released on November 3rd 2001 .

JasperReports Version 1.0 was released on July 21, 2005.

The code was originally licenced under a copyleft JasperReports License and later moved to LGPL.

In April 2005, Paul Doscher, formerly of Business Objects, formed JasperSoft by acquiring the copyright of JasperReports from Teodor Danciu, hired him, and as of July 2005 had raised $23.3m in capital. As a result, JasperSoft is able to give commercial software around the JasperReports product, and negotiate contracts with software developers that wish to embed the JasperReports engine into a closed source product.

JasperSoft's main related product is JasperServer, a Java EE web application that provides advanced report server capabilities such as report scheduling and permissions. It is available under an open source license for use in conjunction with open source infrastructure such as MySQL and JBoss, or a commercial license for enterprise deployments involving commercial databases and application servers.

JasperSoft has leveraged their JasperServer product to enter the OnDemand BI space with a reporting platform for salesforce.com, Jasper4Salesforce. Jasper4Salesforce provides BI around data stored within salesforce.com. Jasper4Salesforce is marketed through salesforce.com's AppExchange application marketplace.

JasperSoft is a gold partner with MySQL, and JasperReports was included in the PostgreSQL distribution Bizgres version 0.7.

JRXML

JasperReports are defined in an XML file format, called JRXML, that can be hand-coded, generated, or designed using a tool. The file format is defined by a Document Type Definition (DTD), providing limited interoperability.

The main difference between using XML and a .jasper file is that the XML file should be compiled in runtime using the JasperCompileManager class.

Third party tools

There are many tools providing JasperReport capabilities:

iReport, iReport Project Pagean open source standalone graphical program that provides report designer capabilities, and is able to run reports using all data source supported by the JasperReports engine. iReport is actively maintained by JasperSoft.

SWTJasperViewer, an open source reusable component that can be embedded in any SWT/JFace application such as Eclipse.

five Eclipse plug-ins that provide report designing and debugging capabilities, including:

an open source iReport plugin for Eclipse

a commercial Eclipse plug-in called JasperAssistant. The JasperAssistant plug-in is built using SWTJasperViewer.

WebReportBuilder, an open source Java J2EE web application that allows web based developers and non developers to create basic and advanced Reports based on JasperReports to be used as a Web Report Server.

OpenReports, a Java EE web application that provides advanced report server capabilities with support four open source reporting engines: JasperReports, JFreeReport, JXLS, and Eclipse BIRT.

IDE Integration

Many prominent Java IDEs provide instructions for users wishing to integrate JasperReports into a project.

IBM Websphere Studio Application Developer

NetBeans

JasperReports Visual Designer for NetBeans -

Further reading

David Heffelfinger (July 2006). JasperReports for Java Developers. Packt Publishing Limited. ISBN 1904811906.

Brian D. Eubanks (November 15, 2005). "Chapter 6. Graphics and Data Visualisation", Wicked Cool Java: code bits, open-source libraries, and project ideas. No Starch Press, pp144-146. ISBN 1593270615.

Code refactoring

JasperReports has been the focus of several academic papers on code refactoring

Jean-Guy Schneider; Rajesh Vasa (2003). "Evolution of Cyclomatic Complexity in Object Oriented Software". 7th workshop on the quantitative approaches in object-oriented software engineering (QAOOSE'2003).

Deepak Advani, Youssef Hassoun, Steve Counsell (January 2005). Heurac: A heuristic-based tool for extracting refactoring data from open-source software versions. Retrieved on 2007-01-11.

Emerson Murphy-Hill (2005). Improving Refactoring with Alternate Program Views. Retrieved on 2007-01-11.

(17-18 November 2005) "Detecting structural changes in object oriented software systems". Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2005). doi:10.1109/ISESE.2005.1541855. ISBN 0-7803-9507-7.

Deepak Advani, Youssef Hassoun, Steve Counsell (2006). "Extracting refactoring trends from open-source software and a possible solution to the 'related refactoring' conundrum". Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing. doi:10.1145/1141277.1141685. ISBN 1-59593-108-2 (New York, USA: ACM Press).

S. Counsell, Y. Hassoun, G. Loizou and R. Najjar (2006). "Common Refactorings, a Dependency Graph and some Code Smells: An Empirical Study of Java OSS". Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on International symposium on empirical software engineering. doi:10.1145/1159733.1159777. ISBN 1-59593-218-6 (New York, USA: ACM Press).