Hi,
we have been using jsreport for our main reporting tool for over two years.
We the developers are really pleased with the API that jsreport provides, but deployment on the server has been really a nightmare for us.
Installing JSreport on our PCs with Windows works like a charm, but it is not the case when it comes to the server.
Currently we are deploying jsreport on CentOS, which becomes harder and harder to maintain. We want to upgrade to latest jsreport, but can't install packages and run the server successfully.
It turns out that not all of the npm packages can be installed on CentOS easily, according to our colleague he experienced the same in the past when he had to setup initially jsreport on the server.
So we are ready to change. We are willing to setup the jsreport from scratch on a dedicated server.
That's why we will be grateful, if you advice us about the best way to maintain a jsreport in production environment. This are the questions that we need help for:

1. Which is the best suitable Linux based OS to be used for running jsreport?
2. Do you have some hardware limitations for RAM, CPU, ect.
3. What are the requirements other than node.js (>= 8.9), npm (>= 6.x)., we want to upgrade to latest jsreport version
4. What is the preferable way to build deployment packages: standard package deploy or docker usage. Currently we use docker but we face some difficulties, which may be caused by the server OS

These are the development packages that we need to install to run our reports, we use chrome-pdf, xlsx, and handlebars to load reports:

    "jsreport": "2.9.0",
    "jsreport-chrome-pdf": "1.8.0",
    "jsreport-cli": "2.2.4",
    "jsreport-pdf-utils": "1.8.0",
    "jsreport-version-control": "1.5.0"

Thanks for your help,
Teodora

Thanks for the replay. It worked perfectly, with this implementation report of 80 pdf pages was generated for 40 seconds, while before it was taking 100 seconds which is huge improving. Thanks

Hi, I tried what you suggested. From the start I didn't want to go in that direction, cause before we got header/footer in pdf utils, but because of the merge to every page with Header-Footer util the generation time was twice bigger than with the usage of "Display header/footer" option.
Anyway, I tried now with pdf-utils header and footer. Now my problem is that the Header-Footer template is merged to the first page only. From the api I see three params only, seems like merge whole documents is not available, or I don't know how to do it.
Here is a sample playground that imitates what I am trying to achieve with our reports

https://playground.jsreport.net/w/teodora.gardjeva.pesheva/rcbQXUsu

Thanks for the help

Hi, I am using handlebars and chrome-pdf to generate a report. We have some pretty big pdf files that takes forever to be generated so I decided to give it a try to the pdf-utils parallel generation.
So far so good, with reducing some necessary big css assets it went down from 90 seconds to 40 seconds.
The problem is that I am using the option "display header/footer". where in the footer the html is

<span class="pageNumber"></span>&nbsp;/&nbsp;<span class="totalPages"></span>

The values of pageNumber and totalPages are not kept through the different parallel generations. One stream generates 14 pages. So report of 70 pages will have 5 times count - 1/14, 2/14 - 14/14 and the again 1/14, 2/14 instead of 1/70, 2/70

here is my code

async function afterRender(req, res) {
  
        const pages = Math.ceil(req.data.allData[0].values.length / req.data.chunckSize);
        const renderPromises = [];
        let reqData;
      
        for (let i = 0; i < pages; i += 1) {
             //...do calculations to split data per page

             renderPromises.push(jsreport.render({
             template: { 
                name: 'reportTemplate'
             },
            data: reqData
            }));
        }

       const results = await Promise.all(renderPromises);

       for (let i = 0; i < results.length; i++) {
            if (i == 0) {
                res.content = results[i].content; // the main report is blank template, so override it
            }
            else {
                 res.content = await jsreport.pdfUtils.append(res.content, (results[i].content));
           }
       }
   
}

I tried also with other way around from i = results.length - 1; to prepend templates, but the result is still the same.

What do I have to fix to keep the paging correct throughout the whole report?

Thanks,
Teodora

We are facing the same issue. If I execute jsreport.renderAsync directly from client side the Excel files are downloaded correctly. But if I use node.js server (with Docker) to download the file is corrupted. I still can't provide more infomation, because the colleague that is developing the node.js API has one more day off. The pdf files are working fine. When he is back, if it is not error on his side we will provide corrupted file. But I assume that it won't be, having in mind that we are not the first one facing the problem.

Best regards,
Teodora

Hi, after lot of struggling I think that I manage to fix this. The solution with downgrading node.js didn't work. Then I tried to install empty 1.10.0 jsreport and migrate it. Like that it worked. So I thought that something is breaking the migration on my PC that is not part of jsreport native (strangely this is not the case on my colleague PC). So we have in the project some external js files that are being required from tempalte scripts. Normally this are valid files but when I checkouted the project, removed the helper js files the migration went fine with recognizing jsreport.config.json.
To be sure that this works I did the same steps again. Next time it didn't work. So something is comepletely wrong with execution on my PC.

jsreport start from D:\Proj\jsReportDev folder and it has been working perfectly fine till I migrated today.
I checkouted the project again from git and migrated it and the same problem occurred. If I stay on 1.10 version it works.
We have a license for single server jsreport and we really want to update production server to version 2

The project was created from scratch: jsreport init as a start point. The things is that the same project on other person machine doesn't have the same problem after migration steps.
Just for test I tried on my PC to create completely new jsreport and there everything went fine.
This is server.js:
var jsreport = require('jsreport')()

if (process.env.JSREPORT_CLI) {
// export jsreport instance to make it possible to use jsreport-cli
module.exports = jsreport
} else {
jsreport.init().then(function () {
// running
}).catch(function (e) {
// error during startup
console.error(e.stack)
process.exit(1)
})
}

And this is the jsreport.config.json:
{
"certificate": {
"key": "certificates/jsreport.net.key",
"cert": "certificates/jsreport.net.cert"
},
"httpPort": 5488,
"httpsPort": null,
"logger": {
"console": {
"transport": "console",
"level": "debug"
},
"file": {
"transport": "file",
"level": "info",
"filename": "logs/reporter.log"
},
"error": {
"transport": "file",
"level": "error",
"filename": "logs/error.log"
}
},
"blobStorage": {
"provider": "fs"
},
"phantom": {
"strategy": "dedicated-process",
"timeout": 60000
},
"allowLocalFilesAccess": false,
"store": {
"provider": "fs"
},
"templatingEngines": {
"strategy": "dedicated-process",
"timeout": 10000,
"allowedModules": [
"request",
"globals"
]
},
"extensions": {
"authentication": {
"cookieSession": {
"secret": "<your strong secret>"
},
"admin": {
"username": "admin",
"password": "password"
},
"enabled": false
},
"scripts": {
"allowedModules": "*",
"timeout": 60000
},
"sample-template": {
"createSamples": true
}
}
}

And logs

2018-06-04T16:42:19.616Z - info: Initializing jsreport@2.1.0 in development mode using configuration file: none
2018-06-04T16:42:19.616Z - info: Searching for available extensions in D:\Proj\jsReportDev\node_modules\jsreport
2018-06-04T16:42:19.647Z - info: Extensions location cache contains up to date information, skipping crawling in D:\Proj\jsReportDev\node_modules\jsreport\node_modules
2018-06-04T16:42:19.663Z - info: Found 5 extensions
2018-06-04T16:42:19.663Z - debug: Writing extension locations cache to C:\Users\TEODOR~2\AppData\Local\Temp\jsreport\core\locations.json
2018-06-04T16:42:19.663Z - debug: Discovered 5 extensions
2018-06-04T16:42:19.678Z - info: Setting process based strategy for rendering. Please visit http://jsreport.net/learn/configuration for information how to get more performance.
2018-06-04T16:42:19.678Z - info: Using extension cli
2018-06-04T16:42:19.694Z - info: Using extension freeze
2018-06-04T16:42:19.694Z - info: Using extension chrome-pdf
2018-06-04T16:42:19.816Z - info: Using extension pdf-utils
2018-06-04T16:42:20.010Z - info: Using extension version-control
2018-06-04T16:42:20.139Z - info: reporter initialized

Hi,
I have just migrated my existing jsreport 1.10 project to version 2. I used the migration tool and answered all the questions. I decided to keep phantom recipe for templates that needed it. Everything with the migration went fine. But after starting the server I don' have anything that listens to 5488 port (it is configured in jsreport.config.json file). So I checked in the reporter.log and I have this message while trying to start the server Initializing jsreport@2.1.0 in development mode using configuration file: none In addition: I followed the same steps on my colleague PC and this problem didn't occur. I even tried to checkout the project and migrate again from start, but the same result. My colleague uses node 8.11 while i am using 9.5 if this helps
Where can I apply this configFile=path to specify the jsreport.config.json file?
Thanks