REST in JasperReports server - uploading reports with python 2.7 and requests

Goals

System Administrators or developers may have a need to upload arbitrary reports 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. Development process - new report version of the report uploaded via SVN or GIT hook. This keeps both reports versioned and deployed to the server.
2. System Administration process - when using an export is not feasible
3. Bulk upload via command-line
4. Embedding report upload functionality in other applications
5. Various test utilities

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, 2.2.4 Creating a Resource describes how to create a request.

In a short form this should be:

1. PUT http://<host>:<port>/jasperserver[-pro]/rest/resource/path/to/resource/
2. form-data: valid ResourceDescriptor
3. application/octet-stream for attached JRXML files.

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. A sample resourcedescriptor_0.xml is attached for reference.

Example request

Looking through requests documentation this should look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/python
import requests
 
#open resource descriptor and jrxml file for reading
try:
  resource_descriptor = open('resource_descriptor.xml', 'rb')
  report_jrxml = open('test.jrxml', 'rb')
except:
  raise
 
#Path to resource rest service:
url = 'http://loclahost:8080/jasperserver-pro/rest/resource'
 
#Authorisation credentials:
auth = ('jasperadmin', 'jasperadmin')
 
#initialize data. Requests will handle encoding.
data = {"ResourceDescriptor": resource_descriptor.read() }
 
#initialize files with report_name and data tuple. Requests will handle encoding.
#Note that "name" in the PUT request should equal report_files path,
#i.e. for report in /repopathtoreport/report the path would be /repopathtoreport/report_files
files = {'/repopathtoreport/report_files': ('report_name', upload)}
 
#making a put request straight from documentation
r = requests.put(url=url, data=data, files=files, auth=auth)
 
#to see request status code do
#print r.status_code
 
#will raise HTTP error if there is one:
r.raise_for_status()
 
#Done! Good practice would be to close files when they are not required - both can be quite big.

Example implementation: command-line utility to upload reports

Example uses jinja2 to render valid ResourceDescriptor.

Templates should be located in 'templates' directory (see res_descr.xml)

See jasperrest_0.zipfor jasperrest.py. Libraries required:

import requests
import argparse
import logging
import httplib
import jinja2
import os

To see help, run jasperrest.py -h :

usage: jasperrest.py [-h] -r REPO_PATH -j REPORT_JRXML -d REPORT_DATASOURCE
                     [-l JASPER_URL] [-u USER] [-p PASSWORD] [-t TEMPLATE]

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
                        New report repository path (with report name)
  -j REPORT_JRXML, --report_jrxml REPORT_JRXML
                        jrxml_file for upload
  -d REPORT_DATASOURCE, --report_datasource REPORT_DATASOURCE
                        datasource repo path
  -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
  -t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE
                        ResourceDescriptor template name in templates dir,
                        default res_descr.xml

Sample syntax:

jasperrest -r /public/new07 -j test.jrxml -d /organizations/organization_1/datasources/repositoryDS -l http://localhost:8080/jasperserver-pro

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.

jasperrest.zip

resourcedescriptor_0.xml

jasperrest_0.zip