REST in JasperReports server - downloading report files with python 2.7 and requests

Goals

System Administrators or developers may have a need to download arbitrary report contents via REST to JasperReports Server. Using a simple script to do that rather than import/export, iReport or JSS can be useful in number of situations:

1. Embedding report download and viewing in other applications
2. Development process - download report content without tying up to repository structure. Could be useful to initilize a new repository with new structure.
3. System Administration process - when using an export is not feasible
4. Bulk download via command-line
5. Various test utilities

This article is related to uploading reports with python 2.7 and requests

Documentation

1. JasperReports Server Web Services Guide - see Docs.
2. Python 2.7 official documentation.
3. Requests library for Python

Short description

Web Services Guide, 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 Requesting the Contents of a JasperReport and Requesting the Contents of a File Resource

This is a bit more complex than uploading a report (see uploading reports with python 2.7 and requests )

1. GET http://<host>:<port>/jasperserver[-pro]/rest/resource/path/to/resource/
2. We will get a valid ResourceDescriptor with all attachements listed
3. Now we need to parse this ResourceDescriptor and download required attachements
4. Nw we need to download each file, for example: GET /jasperserver/rest/resource/reports/samples/AllAccounts_files/AllAccounts_Res3?fileData=true
5. You HAVE to use fileData=true

ResourceDescriptor syntax is out of the scope of this article. I would suggest exisiting ResourceDescriptors. You can check them via iReport or REST GET to resources service.

Example request

#!/usr/bin/env
import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
 
# Path to resource rest service:
url = 'http://loclahost:8080/jasperserver-pro/rest/resource'
 
# Report to process:
report = '/somereport'
 
# Authorisation credentials:
auth = ('jasperadmin', 'jasperadmin')
 
# file types to download:
file_types = ['jrxml', 'img', 'jar' ]
 
# Init session so we have no need to auth again and again:
s = requests.Session()  
r = s.get(url=url+report, auth=auth)
 
# init empty dictionary
files = {}
 
# creating tree from ResourceDescripotor we have in Response
tree = ET.fromstring(r.content)
 
# searching tree. Could be more efficient with Xpath
# You may also implement testing for reportUnit wsType for speedsup  
for i in tree.iter('resourceDescriptor'):
  if 'wsType' in i.attrib:
    # we do not need all wsTypes, checking against file_types set previously
    if i.attrib['wsType'] in file_types:
      #Storing uriString and wsType
      files[i.attrib['name']] = [i.attrib['uriString'], i.attrib['wsType']]
 
# This could have been done while searching the tree.
for filename in files:
    #each file has a bit different url
    file_url = url + files[filename][0]
    using session and parameters to get file content
    r = s.get(url=url, params=params)
    # Files in repository
    # can be stored without extension, so 
    # writing to filename with extension of wsType. i.e:
    # jrxml, jar, img. This has implication of all images
    # having ".img" file extension, etc. 
 
    # Note that file is opened in binary mode
    with open(filename + "." + files[filename][1], "wb") as f:
      # we can have binary data, so using r.content
      f.write(r.content)
 
# Done!

Example implementation: command-line utility to download report files

See report_download.zip.

Required libraries (in most cases only requests needs to be installed):

import requests
import argparse
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import logging
import httplib
import os
import sys 

To see help, run report_download.py -h:

usage: report_download.py [-h] -r REPO_PATH [-f FOLDER] [-l JASPER_URL]
                          [-u USER] [-p PASSWORD]

Upload jrxml file as a report to JasperReports server

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -r REPO_PATH, --repo_path REPO_PATH
                        Report repository path (with report name)
  -f FOLDER, --folder FOLDER
                        Folder to download report
  -l JASPER_URL, --jasper_url JASPER_URL
                        JasperReports Server URL, default
                        http://localhost:8080/jasperserver-pro
  -u USER, --user USER  JasperReports Server user, default superuser
  -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        JasperReports Server password, default superuser

Example usage:

report_download.py -r /organizations/organization_1/reports/samples/Cascading_multi_select_report -l http://localhost/jasperserver-pro-51 -f cascading

Notes

In this article I am assuming the PRO version of JasperReports Server is used. However, the same should work for CE version if you use correct uri, repo path and user.

report_download.zip