Question

I’m working on a Grails application and I need to display some reports and allow the users to export them in the most common formats (PDF, XML…).

I don’t want to embed the SQL query into the report definition, the report logic is integrated into Grails services and the reporting library I’m looking for should work on a dataset (maybe a list of maps) without a real datasource.

I used Jasper Reports and iReport for my tests and they work great together with Grails for the exporting functionality (PDF, XML, HTML). But I have difficult including them into my page template. I would like to have my header, footer, navigation menu and filter within the report html.

The only solution that came in my mind was to use iframe but I don’t like this so much.

Can Jasper Report address my request? do you know any other Java reporting library that allows me to include the report in my HTML body?

Answer 1

You can use the g:include tag to include a controller’s response:

<g:include controller="myJasper" action="showReport" 
    params="[foo: 'bar', baz: 42]" />

Using the Grails Jasper plugin, your controller then would contain code like this:

import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.jasper.JasperExportFormat;
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.jasper.JasperReportDef;

class MyJasperController {
    def jasperService

    def showReport = {
        def reportDef = new JasperReportDef(
            name: 'your_report.jasper', 
            parameters: params,
            fileFormat: JasperExportFormat.HTML_FORMAT)

        def report = jasperService.generateReport(reportDef)
            .toByteArray().toString("UTF-8")

        render report
    }
}