Solving Jaspersoft Studio plug-in issues with the most recent versions of Eclipse

Problem

Different users mentioned strange behaviors of the Jaspersoft Studio plug-in when installed on the most recent flavors of Eclipse.

One example is the disappearing of the JasperReports connections from the Repository Explorer view after a restart. See the following [#14496] - Server connection not saving.

Solution

Considering that the RCP version is a standalone version where we can customize a more "strict" environment, we can not provide the same level of "customization" also in the plug-in version one.

Each Eclipse flavor (ie. Java Developers, J2EE Developers etc.) comes with a different set of bundles pre-installed that might clash with Studio ones or not work properly. The probability that something can wrong is higher when the user Eclipse installation has also other additional bundles. Lastly, also which JRE/JDK is used to kick Eclipse can represent an additional variable to the final environment.

For this reason is always a good idea to give a look at the Jaspersoft Studio product file, in particular the section dedicated to the VM args.

Since Jaspersoft Studio 6.20.1 we moved to Java 11 as minimum required environment for all our plug-ins, before it was Java 8.

Plus after shipping for some releases a bundled Java 11 JRE, we moved in the latest 6.20.6 to a Java 17 version.

Therefore we highly advice to properly modify you "eclipse.ini" file with a proper set of options.

In the above mentioned issue, this means for example adding some instructions like:

--add-exports=java.xml/com.sun.org.apache.xml.internal.serialize=ALL-UNNAMED
--add-opens=java.desktop/sun.java2d=ALL-UNNAMED
--add-opens=java.base/java.io=ALL-UNNAMED
--add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED

This will helps solve the server connection(s) disappear, plus some other possible related runtime/startup issues.