[KronisLV]

> The solution was to use JasperReports.

Ran into it in a legacy project a few years ago, it was a total mess.

The way the templates were written wasn't clear in regards to how the fields will be filled out, conditions and scripts for the visibility of certain sections were problematic (no proper linting/syntax checks outside of runtime), there were problems with system fonts, there were problems with selecting data for filling out the templates, there were problems with the template files looking broken in different versions of the GUI software, there were problems with getting like 50 warnings after opening the template and moving any element a few pixels broke the entire template.

If possible, I'll avoid the technology, especially after trying to migrate the project to JDK 11 broke because of incompatibilities of that version of the library. Personally, I think that HTML output that then can be rendered to PDF is the only decent option in this space, which will save you many headaches.

[mike22]

I’ve never used Jaspersoft, only seen the marketing pages of recent years on Tibco’s site. But much of that developer experience sounds like my 4-ish years with BIRT: differing versions of the designer GUI in Eclipse breaking things; debugging a report required starting up our entire monolith app.

How much better is SSRS in these aspects than the aforementioned Java-based solutions? Or I guess “paginated reports” in Power BI nowadays.