How to Use a JavaScript Reporting Tool in Your Java Web Application

In modern web applications, delivering interactive and insightful reports isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a core requirement for many business workflows. Whether you’re building dashboards, analytics screens, or data-driven interfaces, being able to visualize structured data directly in the browser can significantly elevate the user experience. When your backend is powered by Java, however, integrating a flexible, modern reporting solution often raises questions around architecture, dependencies, and deployment.

In this post, you’ll learn how to integrate ActiveReportsJS, a 100% client-side JavaScript reporting tool with zero server dependencies, into a Java web application. Because ActiveReportsJS runs entirely in the browser, it can be paired with any web server, including Java, without additional reporting services. This tutorial guides you through exposing data via a JSON API, designing a report, and embedding an interactive report viewer into your application, giving you a practical foundation for delivering rich, browser-based reporting in Java-powered projects.

By the end, you will be able to do the following:

• Create a Java application serving a JSON API using Spring framework
• Initialize the data from a CSV file
• Configure JSON API endpoints
• Create an ActiveReportsJS report to visualize the data from the JSON API
• Create a static HTML page to display the report in the report viewer
  
  

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Prerequisites 

The following content assumes that you have A Java™ Development Kit installed on your machine. Spring framework guidelines recommend using BellSoft Liberica JDK version 8 or version 11. It would help if you also had ActiveReportsJS installed on your device. If you don't have it, you can obtain it from the ActiveReportsJS website.

Create a Java application

For this tutorial, we will use the Spring web framework. 
To create a new Java application that uses Spring web framework, you can use the "Spring Initializr" website. This article assumes that the Name and the Artifact of the newly created application are "ReportingOnSpring" and the rest of the generator parameters have default values, as in the picture below. The application needs the "Spring Web" dependency to be added.

Click the "Generate" button, download the archive, unzip it, and open the "ReportingOnSpring" folder in your favorite code editor, such as Visual Studio Code.

Add Application Data

We will use the Sales dataset that you can download from the E for Excel website. It offers datasets of various sizes, starting from 100 records to 5 million records. For simplicity, we will use the first dataset, which contains 100 records.

Download and unzip the data from the 100-Sales-Records.zip  archive into the "src\main\resources" directory of the application. 

There are many fields in the dataset, but we will only use several of them in this tutorial. 

Add the "com.opencsv" package into the dependency list of the application in the "pom.xml" file.

    <dependency>

      <groupId>com.opencsv</groupId>

      <artifactId>opencsv</artifactId>

      <version>5.3</version>

  </dependency>

Add the "Sale.java" file into the "src\main\java\com\example\ReportingOnSpring" folder and add the following content to it:

package com.example.ReportingOnSpring;
import com.opencsv.bean.CsvBindByName;
 
public class Sale {
    @CsvBindByName(column = "Region")
    private String region;    
 
    @CsvBindByName(column = "Item Type")
    private String itemType;
    
    @CsvBindByName(column = "Units Sold")
    private Integer unitsSold;    
 
    public String getRegion() {
        return region;
    }
 
    public void setRegion(String region) {
        this.region = region;
    }
 
    public String getItemType() {
        return itemType;
    }
 
    public void setItemType(String itemType) {
        this.itemType = itemType;
    }
 
    public Integer getUnitsSold() {
        return unitsSold;
    }
 
    public void setUnitsSold(Integer unitSold) {
        this.unitsSold = unitSold;
    }
 
    @Override public String toString() {
        return "Sale{" +
                "region='" + region + '\'' +
                ", itemType='" + itemType + '\'' +
                ", unitSold=" + unitsSold +
                '}';
    }
}

Configure JSON API EndPoints

Open the "src\main\java\com\example\ReportingOnSpring\ReportingOnSpringApplication.java" file and replace its content with the following:

package com.example.ReportingOnSpring;
 
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestParam;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
import org.springframework.util.ResourceUtils;
 
import com.opencsv.bean.CsvToBeanBuilder;
 
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.util.List;
 
 
@SpringBootApplication
@RestController
public class DemoApplication {
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
    }
 
    @GetMapping("/api/sales")
    public List<Sale> sales() throws FileNotFoundException {
        File file = ResourceUtils.getFile("classpath:100 Sales Records.csv");
        List<Sale> sales = new CsvToBeanBuilder(new FileReader(file))
                .withType(Sale.class)
                .withIgnoreLeadingWhiteSpace(true)
                .build()
                .parse();
        return sales;
    }
 
}

Run the application using the "mvnw spring-boot:run" command, and open the "http://localhost:8080/api/sales" URL to ensure that the JSON API was configured properly and returns the sales data.

Create an ActiveReportsJS Report

Let's now create a report that visualizes the data from the JSON API.

In the Standalone Report Designer Application, click the File menu and select the Continuous Page Layout template for a newly created report.

Open the Data panel of the property inspector and click the Add button.

In the Data Source editor dialog, type  http://localhost:8080/api/sales in the ENDPOINT field and click the Save Changes button.

Click the + icon near DataSource in the Data panel.

In the Data Set Editor dialog, type Sales in the NAME field, and $.* in the JSON Path field.

Click the Validate button, ensure that the DataBase Fields section displays [3 items] text, and click the Save Changes button.

Expand the toolbox using the Hamburger menu located on the toolbar's left side.

Drag and drop the Chart item from the toolbox to the report page area's top-left corner. The Chart Wizard dialog appears. Select the Bar type and click the Next button on the first screen.

On the second screen of the dialog, configure the data as shown in the following image and click the Next button.

On the third screen, click the Finish button.

Resize the chart report item to fill the entire width of the report page. Click the chart legend to load its properties into the properties panel and set the Orientation property to Horizontal and Position property to Bottom.

Click the File menu and save the newly created report in the "src\main\resources\static" folder of the application under the name SalesReport.rdlx-json.

Create a Static HTML Page to Display the Report

In the "src\main\resources\static" folder of the application, create the report.html file and replace its content with the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Sales Report</title>
    <link
    rel="stylesheet"
    href="https://cdn.grapecity.com/activereportsjs/3.latest/styles/ar-js-ui.css"
    type="text/css"
  />
  <link
    rel="stylesheet"
    href="https://cdn.grapecity.com/activereportsjs/3.latest/styles/ar-js-viewer.css"
    type="text/css"
  />
  <script src="https://cdn.grapecity.com/activereportsjs/3.latest/dist/ar-js-core.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.grapecity.com/activereportsjs/3.latest/dist/ar-js-viewer.js"></script>
  <script src="https://cdn.grapecity.com/activereportsjs/3.latest/dist/ar-js-pdf.js"></script>
  <style>
    #viewer-host {
      width: 100%;
      height: 100vh;
    }
  </style>      
</head>
    
<body>
    <div id="viewer-host"></div>
    <script>
        var viewer = new ActiveReports.Viewer("#viewer-host");
        viewer.open('SalesReport.rdlx-json');
      </script>  
</body>
</html>

Open the http://localhost:8080/report.html in the browser to see the report. If you followed the steps correctly, you should see a report that displays the data from the JSON API.

Adding rich reporting capabilities to your Java web application doesn’t have to mean choosing a heavyweight server-side engine or wrestling with incompatible libraries. By leveraging a 100% client-side solution like ActiveReportsJS, you can provide highly interactive, performant reports that integrate cleanly with your existing Spring-powered APIs.

From serving data through a JSON endpoint to rendering dynamic visualizations in the browser, this approach provides a flexible, framework-agnostic way to enhance your application’s data experience. With the steps in this post, you now have a foundation to build more sophisticated reporting features, including parameterized views, export options, and interactive dashboards, tailored to your users’ needs. Happy coding!

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