Drop JasperReports support [SPR-13294]

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller opened SPR-13294 and commented

JasperReports deprecated its classic JRExporter API as of version 5.5.2, in favor of a new Exporter API. Let's migrate to this for Spring Framework 5.0 (by then more than two years after JasperReports 5.5.2 already).

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Issue Links:

• Remove Velocity support [SPR-13795] #18368 Remove Velocity support

Referenced from: commits 7dda9fb

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

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.

As a consequence, we rather recommend native use of the JasperReports API in Spring MVC handler methods, generating reports from specifically designed RESTful endpoints. We are dropping our now semi-useless JasperReports view class hierarchy as of Spring Framework 5.0. Note that our existing support against the deprecated JRExporter API remains around in the Spring Framework 4.3.x line until 2019, in particular for existing applications. However, even with 4.3, native use of the JasperReports API is worth considering.