Jasper Reports: Fill & Download for Free

Innovent Solutions published a series of articles called Open Source Reporting Review, comparing the features of Jasper Reports, BIRT, and Pentaho.It is from early 2012, but is likely still a good source of information:

There is no evident difference between functions of the two reporting tools. Both use the drag-control design style, and provide similar styles of presentation, with rich and beautiful graphics.Differences between both exist out of functions:Crystal report is a fee-based product, while Jasper Report is free and open source.Developed in C language, Crystal report is far more awkward to be integrated in J2EE application server, but easy to be embedded in the GUI program; JasperReport, as developed in Java, can be seamlessly integrated in mainstream J2EE application server, but it is cumbersome to be embedded into a Windows GUI program (unless the program is developed in Java, which is a rare thing).In data source computation, both are not powerful, especially in support for multiple data sources, they are not good at completing it with lesser codes. For Jasper Report, it is pure Java-based product. It is suggested you solve this problem with esProc, in which, you can achieve join operation over multiple data sources, and through JDBC interface, data will be returned to Jasper Report for presentation. Crystal Report supports JDBC interface also, but not a direct way, because it has to implement data exchange at the cost of performance and information lost.In contrast, Jasper Report is preferred. Currently, there are rich Java-relevant resources, and WEB applications also prevail.

I have integrated jasper reports with my SpringBoot applications.With jasper we can export reports to pdf,xslx,csv and xsl.Here is sample code I used. Have a look.JRXlsxExporter exporterXLS = new JRXlsxExporter(); exporterXLS.setExporterInput(new SimpleExporterInput(jasperPrint)); exporterXLS.setExporterOutput(new SimpleOutputStreamExporterOutput("DailyReport-" + date.toString() + ".xlsx")); SimpleXlsxReportConfiguration reportConfigXLS= new SimpleXlsxReportConfiguration(); reportConfigXLS.setSheetNames(new String[] { "Daily Report Data" }); exporterXLS.setConfiguration(reportConfigXLS); exporterXLS.exportReport(); log.info("REPORT : EXCEL File sent to Report Folder");  //sending excel file to browser JRXlsxExporter xlsxExporter = new JRXlsxExporter(); final byte[] rawBytes;  try(ByteArrayOutputStream xlsReport = new ByteArrayOutputStream()){  xlsxExporter.setExporterInput(new SimpleExporterInput(jasperPrint));  xlsxExporter.setExporterOutput(new SimpleOutputStreamExporterOutput(xlsReport));  xlsxExporter.exportReport();  rawBytes = xlsReport.toByteArray();  } data= rawBytes; header.setContentType(MediaType.parseMediaType("application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet")); header.set(HttpHeaders.CONTENT_DISPOSITION, "inline; filename=DailyReport.xlsx"); header.setContentLength(data.length); log.info("REPORT : EXCEL File sent to web browser"); Happy coding !!!