Introduction

PDF report generation with jasper reports from PHP

What is Jasperreports ?¶

JasperReports is a template based opensource reporting library popular amongst Java developers. It comes with a pretty decent visual designer Jasperstudio and supports an impressive list of features such as barcode, fonts, layout, pagination, page size, orientation, columns, precise text spacing / wrapping, charts, subreports, svg, translations... and allow creation of sophisticated reports. It's opinionated and requires to catch few principles, like report bands, parameters, datasources, subreports...

What's the use case ?¶

Whenever you need to achieve near pixel-perfect, semi-complex reports layouts that would simply make no sense to develop with pure-php or puppeteer / headless chrome based approaches. Think of a product catalog, a complex invoice, tracking labels...

What is soluble-jasper ?¶

soluble-jasper relies on a network based bridge to the JVM and allows to manipulate the report creation from the PHP side. Basically you just run the jrxml template designed with JasperStudio:

<?php declare(strict_types=1);

use Soluble\Japha\Bridge\Adapter as JavaBridgeAdapter;
use Soluble\Jasper\{ReportRunnerFactory, Report, ReportParams};
use Soluble\Jasper\DataSource\JavaSqlConnection;
use Soluble\Jasper\Exporter\PDFExporter;

// Create a connection to the Jasper bridge.
$reportRunner = ReportRunnerFactory::getBridgedReportRunner(
    new JavaBridgeAdapter([
        'servlet_address' => 'localhost:8080/JasperReports/servlet.phpjavabridge'    
    ])
);

$report = new Report(

     // Set the report template file
     '/path/my_report.jrxml',

     // Param values that sent to the report template
     // i.e. <textFieldExpression><![CDATA[$P{BookTitle}]]></textFieldExpression> 
     new ReportParams([
            'BookTitle'    => 'Soluble Jasper',
            'BookSubTitle' => 'Generated on JVM with Jasper reports'
     ]),

     // Set a database connection if you're using queries in your 
     // report
     new JavaSqlConnection(
         'jdbc:mysql://localhost/my_db?user=user&password=password',
         'com.mysql.jdbc.Driver'
     )
);

// Step 3: Export the report

$pdfExporter = new PDFExporter($report, $reportRunner);
$pdfExporter->saveFile('/path/my_report_output.pdf', [
    // PDF metadata
    'author' => 'John Doe',
    'title' => 'My document'
]);

This approach have few drawbacks (the main one is having to install a bridge server running jasper report on the JVM) but offers a great level of flexibility and speed (bridged api, no cli, no startup time). See comparison of alternatives.

Features¶

Report generation in PDF (other formats can be supported, open an issue)
Datasources for JDBC, JSON and XML (url or filesystem)
Support for PSR-7 responses (stream)

Requirements¶

PHP 7.1+
JasperBridge (see install)
Java

Alternatives¶

JasperReport based¶

JasperStarter A CLI to run jasper reports
JasperServer

PHP based¶

FPDF, mpdf, tcpdf...

Others¶

Convert HTML, Markdown, Office to PDF

Gotenberg A Docker-powered stateless API for converting HTML, Markdown and Office documents to PDF
Unoconv