Most of the scripts I write include an email that includes status and timing of each command. When these are run via cron, I get a second email from the cronjob. In order to stop this just add this to the top of the cronjob file:

MAILTO=

This will stop cron from sending out email and allows for turning back on when you need to debug.

I use a single instance of JasperReportsServer Enterprise, this means that I use the same host for testing as well as production.  I ran into a problem where I was making some minor changes and it broke a set of reports, the bad part is I didn’t know they were broken till my users started to send me emails. With a larger set of reports on the horizon, I needed to come up with a plan to test the currently installed reports so I catch problems before any client does.

The plan I put into place seems to work fine for my situation, so I thought I would share what I did.

• Create a servlet (it could be a script)  that allows me to run a report and return the data in csv format.
• Run the report and export the data to a file in csv format. Save to a directory  call “expected”.
• Create a Junit test that calls the the servlet and dumps the data to a file. Then open the file in the “expected” directory and diff them.

I did this with each test and on error I email myself the results.

Here is how I setup my eclipse project.