Lately, I've been doing some work with JasperReports. On my previous JasperReports projects, I've either used Maven, which automatically takes care of resolving dependencies, or I have simply downloaded the project's dependencies by hand.
Using Maven is nice, since it resolves dependencies, however, JasperReports comes with a series of useful ANT tasks to compile reports, preview them etc. I wanted access to these tasks and I also wanted dependency management.
There were a couple of ways I could achieve both. I know ANT targets can be called from Maven, this could be one approach. Also, there is a dependency manager for ANT called Ivy. I had briefly used Ivy before, I thought I would try this approach.
Ivy works by adding a series of custom ANT tasks, installing Ivy is very simple, all that needs to be done is to copy the Ivy jar file to ${ANT_HOME}/lib. Once Ivy is installed, custom Ivy tasks are available in our ANT build files.
Some additional configuration needs to be done in an Ivy specific XML file, named ivy.xml. In this file is where we actually specify our dependencies.
I set up my project to depend on JasperReports and tried to have Ivy automatically download all of JasperReports dependencies, unfortunately the build failed, complaining about some missing dependencies, specifically mondrian and commons-javaflow.
[ivy:retrieve] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:retrieve] :: UNRESOLVED DEPENDENCIES ::
[ivy:retrieve] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:retrieve] :: commons-javaflow#commons-javaflow;20060411: not found
[ivy:retrieve] :: mondrian#mondrian;2.3.2.8944: not found
[ivy:retrieve] ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
[ivy:retrieve]
[ivy:retrieve] :: USE VERBOSE OR DEBUG MESSAGE LEVEL FOR MORE DETAILS
After some googling, some head scratching (and some hair pulling and banging on the table for good measure), I found out what was going on.
JasperReports has some optional dependencies declared in its pom.xml, these dependencies are not downloaded by default when using Maven, however Ivy attempts to download them. For some reason these dependencies do not exist in the repository, because of this the ANT build fails.
After some research, I found out the necessary modifications to ivy.xml to make the build succeed:
<ivy-module version="2.0">
<info organisation="ensode" module="mymodule"/>
<dependencies>
<dependency org="jasperreports" name="jasperreports" rev="3.1.2" conf="*->default"/>
</dependencies>
</ivy-module>What I had to do was to use the conf attribute of the <dependency> tag to specify that I wanted that configuration for this particular dependency. The *-> default means that all your module configurations depend on the 'default' configuration of JasperReports, as explained by Xavier Hanin in this message of the Ivy users mailing list.
After making this change, Ivy was able to successfully download all JasperReports dependencies.
[ivy:retrieve] commons-beanutils#commons-beanutils;1.8.0 by [commons-beanutils#commons-beanutils;1.7.0] in [runtime]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| | modules || artifacts |
| conf | number| search|dwnlded|evicted|| number|dwnlded|
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| runtime | 14 | 12 | 12 | 2 || 11 | 11 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I figured I would document this procedure in case others are having similar issues.
