PDF and HTML reports do not display data after upgrade

Scenario:

You designed some reports in TIBCO Jaspersoft^® Studio and deployed them to your server. They worked fine.

You upgraded the server and now the reports display empty values in the fields in PDF and HTML output. CSV output is still fine.

What could cause this?

Solution:

Check the report design to see what font your fields use. By default Jaspersoft Studio creates fields with "SansSerif" font. It is not an actual font but sort of a wildcard. This value, just like "Serif" and "monospaced", is resolved to the default font from that family for your JVM. During the upgrade the JVM may have changed or the OS and it's version which changed the font as well. Even if it resolves to the same font as previously, the font file itself can be different. The only way to ensure the consistency of output between the versions, JVM's and operating systems is to use an actual font instead of font family wildcard and have that font packaged in the font extension.

To create a font extension in Jaspersoft Studio, go to Window > Preferences > Jaspersoft Studio > Fonts, press Add, point to files containing the font, select PDF encoding and make sure the Embed this Font in PDF document is checked. Then in the font screen select your newly added font and press export. Save the exported JAR under some name with .jar extension. Afterwards, make sure all your fields in the report use that font, add the font to your WAR file lib folder (${JasperReports WAR}/WEB-INF/lib) and restart TIBCO JasperReports^® Server.