Jasper report generating bad HTML

Question

Hi,

If I view the HTML generated by one of my Jasper reports in IE7 I see the following:

<BR /><BR />
<A name="JR_PAGE_ANCHOR_0_1">
<TABLE style="WIDTH: 1000px" cellSpacing="0" cellPadding="0" bgColor="#ffffff" border="0">
<-- table body omitted -->
</TABLE>

The two BR tags are added via the JRHtmlExporterParameter.HTML_HEADER parameter. After these tags and before the beginning of the report table that there's an unclosed anchor tag that is generated by Jasper reports. The fact that this tag is not correctly closed is messing up the formatting of my report because IE is hyperlinking the entire report TABLE. I'm not actually using this anchor tag, so if I could prevent Jasper from generating it, that would solve my problem.

Incidentally, this problem only occurs in IE, in Firefox everything works fine because the anchor tag is properly closed.

Thanks in advance, Don

Answer 1

That's odd code, the <br /> tags are XHTML-style, while the unclosed a tags are good old HTML, like the upper case tag names. If you serve such page with plain HTML header/content-type, perhaps IE will be happy.

When you write that Firefox closes the tag, I suppose you mean it correctly doesn't extend the hyperlink span over block tags. Note that FF's view source can display closing tags that are not there when you save the page to disk!

Frankly, I don't know if you can get rid of these anchors with some config. If nobody comes with a real solution, maybe you can download Jasper's source code and search JR_PAGE_ANCHOR in it, looking if the code generating it is conditionally driven.

Or, if you can, you can apply post-processing of the generated code.

Answer 2

I took Phil's advice and dove into the Jasper source code. I've fixed the problem and submitted it to the project. Details of the cause and resolution are available here.