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Documentation for Jasperserver

I installed Jasperserver in my PC using the Bitnami installer. It automatically installed MySql along with Jasperserver. Now I am lost on how to proceed in getting my data in and start generating reports. Is there any good documentation(I do not want to buy their paid documentation) available on the web?

Thanks...

Solution

  • Jasperserver is mainly an application to manage and administer your report resources. It helps in making reports more accessible and provides an web-interface to manage and execute the them. For this purpose it comes with its own mysql-based repository that is used to store metadata about your reports. This repository is completely unrelated to your actual report data, which might come from a variety of different sources such as mysql-datasources, mondrian-datasources, xmla-datasources, oracle-datasources, etc. The repository stores for example:

    • report database connections
    • image resources used by the report
    • report parameters along with user input controls, that are used in the web-frontend to parameterize your report execution
    • the report definition in XML
    • ...

    For the creation of the actual report you use iReports, which can connect to the jasperserver to get all the aforementioned metadata information. You then design your report using the parameters and the datasource provided by jasperserver. On completion you upload your finished report to jasperserver. From there you can execute it and display the result in either HTML or alternatively export it to PDF, XLS, etc. Jasperserver also takes care of the scheduling of reports at a given time.

    In your concrete case you would probably do the following steps:

    • log into the jasperserver webadmin interface (jasperadmin:jasperadmin by default)
    • Create a database connection resource in the repository that points to your report datasource (can be oracle, mysql, postgres, ... ).
    • Create a new report resource, and set the connection to the one you just created
    • fire up ireport, connect it to you jasperserver instance and open the report from the repository
    • design your report in ireport
    • upload your report back to jasperserver
    • execute the report via jasperserver's web-interface

    more information under http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperserver/docs