My dollar signs are now little boxes

Question

This week we upgraded to JasperReports Server 4.7 (Professional) and iReport 4.7. I have several reports that I created in iReport 4.5.1 and successfully used in JasperReports Server 4.5.1.

After the upgrade, all of my dollar signs are now little boxes. The pattern for my currency fields is ¤ #,##0.00. JasperReports Server is not replacing the box with a dollar sign when the report is generated. Everything looks ok in the pattern sample. My percentage symbols are all still working. I tried removing and applying the currency pattern to the fields again, but this didn't fix the problem.

Any thoughts on how I can fix this?

Answer 1

This is Java operating as intended... but not as you want it to operate. Your locale does not specify a currency, so you get that "¤" symbol.

You could workaround it by changing your locale from "en" to "en_US". I just did this last week. As a side note, I found one tweak that I needed to make. After changing the locale to en_US I needed to copy one file like this:

cp .../jasperserver-pro/scripts/jquery/js/jquery.ui.datepicker-en.js .../jasperserver-pro/scripts/jquery/js/jquery.ui.datepicker-en-US.js

Alternatively, I usually find it's better to work around it by setting your format mask to use a hard-coded dollar sign. If you are displaying "$50.00" to a user in the United States, it would be nonsensical to display "€50,00" to a European user or "¥50.00" to a Japanese user for the same value. There are lots of times when the hard-coded currency symbol is more appropriate.