Getting Started

This guide walks you through integrating ReportShell™ and serving your first report in a Spring Boot application. ReportShell is an embedded web reporting framework; add the starter, point it at your reports, and you have REST APIs and a web report viewer running inside your own Spring Boot application.

For an overview and feature tour, see What is ReportShell?

Source Code & Sample Reports

The source code of this guide and sample reports are available on GitHub.

Add ReportShell Starter

repositories {
  maven {
    url = uri("https://maven.pkg.github.com/bivektor/reportshell")
  }
}

dependencies {
  implementation("com.bivektor.reportshell:reportshell-spring-boot-starter-web:${reportShellVersion}")
}

Configure your Report Repository

ReportShell works directly with your precompiled .jasper files. The simplest setup is to place them in a folder that mimics your Jaspersoft Studio workspace structure.

1. Put your compiled .jasper files, subreports and any images under a directory (for example, /reports).
2. Configure a JasperReports RepositoryService so that the default report store can locate the reports. The simplest way is to just use the DefaultRepositoryService but it doesn’t allow setting a base directory. This quick start and other GitHub samples use a FileRepositoryService instead. See jasperreports_extension.properties (opens in a new tab) file for configuring such a service.

That’s it. Report URLs with path {reportFileName} are resolved from the file system at /path/to/base/directory/{reportFileName}.jasper.

Tip

ReportShell by default uses JasperReports Library’s RepositoryUtil for locating and loading reports. You can customize this with a custom report store. See report resolution for more details.

Build your UI

Use ReportShell’s REST APIs to build a fully custom report viewer with your preferred frontend framework.

ReportShell exposes the necessary metadata needed to generate dynamic parameter forms and report viewer components.

ReportShell also provides the REST APIs for filling and storing print data as persistent executions, and rendering reports in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, Excel, and more).

React Viewer

ReportShell ships a React-based frontend viewer as a reference implementation. See React Viewer guide for more details.