Why was Jasper support dropped out from Spring Framework 5.x?

Question

We have been using Jasper with Spring Boot for our project's reporting feature but according to the Spring Framework 5.x release documentation Jasper support has been dropped out.

• May I know why this has been done?

They have recommended to stay on Spring Framework 4.3.x in case we need Jasper support.

• What if we want to upgrade to Spring Framework 5.x and still use Jasper, is there any alternative for doing so ?

Answer 1

Both parts of your question are answered in the JIRA ticket that tracked the support being dropped.

May I know why this has been done?

After some investigation, the new Exporter API in JasperReports is designed for upfront configuration in the form of ExporterInput / ExporterOutput objects, not lending itself to the piecemeal approach in Spring's JasperReports view class hierarchy and in particular not to the declarative configuration style typically used there. Even aside from that, we'd have to redesign our entire JasperReports view support in an severely incompatible way, due to the wide-ranging API changes across the JasperReports configuration model.

What if we want to upgrade to Spring Framework 5.x and still use Jasper, is there any alternative for doing so?

As a consequence, we rather recommend native use of the JasperReports API in Spring MVC handler methods, generating reports from specifically designed RESTful endpoints.