[rt-users] RT and JasperReports Server Integration (got it working, anyone interested?)

[Benjamin Boksa]

Hi Everyone,

RT has been my primary tool to manage Tickets and other Requests since 2001 (RT 2.x) and I am still using it everyday. During the last few years I integrated some billing functions into RT (by using custom fields, workflows etc.). As a natural consequence I have reached the point where I need a function I could not find in RT itself: easily manageable print layouts (aka PDFs ;-) ) that can be custom tailored to fit my client's needs (e.g. grouping by cost unit).

After a few days of work I now have a completely working system that allows me to create pretty, printable Reports from RT using JasperReports Server [1].

It uses RT's REST API with customizable (query builder) queries and a simple definition (REST Interface URL, Username and Password) to access ticket data from JasperReports Server. I have done so by creating a custom DataSource [2] and a custom QueryExecuter [3] for JasperReports - all you need to know to prepare your data from RT to be used in a Jasper report are the credentials of your instance's REST Interface and the query builder query you would like to run - you should know all of these if you work with RT regularly ;-)

You can then use tools like iReport [4] to design fantastic reporting templates for your RT data including your logo, graphs and many other cool things.

As you already might have guessed I think I have found a pretty good solution to integrate RT and JasperReports Server. Now I am standing at the point where I wonder

a) If this is interesting to the RT community (found some mails back in 2007)?
b) If anyone of you is interested in joining my efforts to improve the solution?
c) If there is anything else you would like to know about the solution?
d) As a part of the project I have also built a single J2EE component (DAO [5]) to access the RT REST Interface - would you like to see this component to be released independently?

I would be glad to get some feedback from you to see if this will be a cool thing for myself or if it makes sense to create a project for the RT community - I have many cool ideas in the back of my head (like direct integration into the RT web interface).

Looking forward to your answers and sending curious greetings from Cologne

Benjamin


P.S.: As this is a very "developerish" topic I hope it is OK to crosspost this mail...


[1] http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperserver
[2] http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/sample.reference/datasource/index.html#customdatasource
[3] http://jasperforge.org/uploads/publish/jasperreportswebsite/trunk/sample.reference/hibernate/index.html#queryexecuters
[4] http://jasperforge.org/projects/ireport
[5] http://java.sun.com/blueprints/corej2eepatterns/Patterns/DataAccessObject.html