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

[ktm at rice.edu]

Hi Benjamin,

Very cool. I would certainly be interested in this project. This may ameleorate some
of the reporting issues that we have.

Regards,
Ken

On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 12:39:25PM +0200, Benjamin Boksa wrote:
> 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