Hey Benjamin,
So I woke up this morning thinking about sorting out our RT
reporting/billing issues, and the first email I see is yours. Needless
to say, I am very interested!
JL
On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 8:51 AM, k...@rice.edu <k...@rice.edu> wrote:
> Hi Benjamin,
>
> Very cool. I would certainly be interested in this project. This may
> ameleorate some
> of the reporting issues that we have.
>
> Regards,
> Ken
>
> On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 12:39:25PM +0200, Benjamin Boksa wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> RT has been my primary tool to manage Tickets and other Requests since 2001
>> (RT 2.x) and I am still using it everyday. During the last few years I
>> integrated some billing functions into RT (by using custom fields, workflows
>> etc.). As a natural consequence I have reached the point where I need a
>> function I could not find in RT itself: easily manageable print layouts (aka
>> PDFs ;-) ) that can be custom tailored to fit my client's needs (e.g.
>> grouping by cost unit).
>>
>> After a few days of work I now have a completely working system that allows
>> me to create pretty, printable Reports from RT using JasperReports Server
>> [1].
>>
>> It uses RT's REST API with customizable (query builder) queries and a simple
>> definition (REST Interface URL, Username and Password) to access ticket data
>> from JasperReports Server. I have done so by creating a custom DataSource
>> [2] and a custom QueryExecuter [3] for JasperReports - all you need to know
>> to prepare your data from RT to be used in a Jasper report are the
>> credentials of your instance's REST Interface and the query builder query
>> you would like to run - you should know all of these if you work with RT
>> regularly ;-)
>>
>> You can then use tools like iReport [4] to design fantastic reporting
>> templates for your RT data including your logo, graphs and many other cool
>> things.
>>
>> As you already might have guessed I think I have found a pretty good
>> solution to integrate RT and JasperReports Server. Now I am standing at the
>> point where I wonder
>>
>> a) If this is interesting to the RT community (found some mails back in
>> 2007)?
>> b) If anyone of you is interested in joining my efforts to improve the
>> solution?
>> c) If there is anything else you would like to know about the solution?
>> d) As a part of the project I have also built a single J2EE component (DAO
>> [5]) to access the RT REST Interface - would you like to see this component
>> to be released independently?
>>
>> I would be glad to get some feedback from you to see if this will be a cool
>> thing for myself or if it makes sense to create a project for the RT
>> community - I have many cool ideas in the back of my head (like direct
>> integration into the RT web interface).
>>
>> Looking forward to your answers and sending curious greetings from Cologne
>>
>> Benjamin
>>
>>
>> P.S.: As this is a very "developerish" topic I hope it is OK to crosspost
>> this mail...
>>
>>
>> [1] http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperserver
>> [2]
>> http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/sample.reference/datasource/index.html#customdatasource
>> [3]
>> http://jasperforge.org/uploads/publish/jasperreportswebsite/trunk/sample.reference/hibernate/index.html#queryexecuters
>> [4] http://jasperforge.org/projects/ireport
>> [5]
>> http://java.sun.com/blueprints/corej2eepatterns/Patterns/DataAccessObject.html
