Search

Which Jama Reporting Tool To Use

Shawnna Williams
Shawnna Williams
  • Updated

Author: Shawnna Williams

Updated: February 2025

Audience: System Engineers, Engineering Leadership, etc

Products Applicable: Jama Connect®

Use Case

How to Decide: Which Jama Reporting Tool To Use

Best Practice

Jama Comes with tools to export your data:

1. Work and Excel Exports and Office Templates

2. Velocity Reporting

Word and Excel Exports and Mail Merge-based Office Templates options. These tools are great for quickly getting information out of Jama Software, but sometimes the built-in Word and Excel Exports and Office Templates don’t give you what you want without post-processing. Exports and Office Templates can export your data into a formatted “document” (with headers, footers, a table of contents, a cover page, and heading levels). That said, they are limited when you need to customize the following: 

Ordering of Documents Word templates will always order the included items in the same order they appeared in Jama Software when the export was generated. You'll need to use a custom export to ensure that items stay together or that certain item types always display before others.
Style Formatting Though we support basic text formatting like bullets and text decoration, Word templates do not help control page formatting options like section breaks or custom page numbering. Velocity reports do not provide analogs for every option available to native Word documents; they’ll provide a broader level of control than Word exports do. 
Ancestors and Descendants Word templates have limited support for children, but Velocity allows much more access to follow relationships and tree structure through multiple levels.
Conditional Logic Velocity allows much more control over when and where to display information than Word does. If you’d like to display an item’s status, but only if it was created more than 30 days ago and has an upstream relationship to a feature, you’ll need to use an advanced reporting engine. 

Implementation

Suppose you must incorporate additional logic, apply custom formatting, group similar items, or access child items. In that case, you may require more control over your report output than what Word templates can provide. It’s essential to note that if a more straightforward option suffices, we highly recommend choosing that. Custom reporting is the most effective way to format your data to meet your needs. Fortunately, Jama Connect allows you to upload reports created using Velocity. Now, we need to consider which tool best fits your requirements.

To help you make this decision, please review the chart comparing Velocity and Office Templates.

Jama Reporting Tools Comparison Chart Velocity Office Templates
Output to Word X X
Output to Work using Word's styling X X
Output to Excel X X
Output to HTML X  
Output to PDF X  
Generate a report based on the data results currently displayed in Jama. X X
Apply programmatic logic and use parameters. X  
Ability to re-import into Jama and update existing items   X
Access to Jama's API X  
Embed images into the document. X X

When evaluating Velocity Advanced Reporting

Velocity is a Java-based language that comes with the web server on which Jama is installed. It utilizes the Jama Velocity API (not the Jama REST API) to export data as HTML.

When to use Velocity for your reports

When your final report needs to be formatted as a formal document, it should include headers, footers, heading levels, a Table of Contents, and other necessary elements.

Relationships: Typically, logic is applied to the relationships in the data.

Example: Only display Subsystem Requirements linked to a specific System Requirement.

Reporting Multiple Item Types: You need to present more than one type of item in a single table.

Example: One row may display the Requirement fields and their corresponding Verification status.

Applying Logic to Data: There may be situations where logic must be applied to the report's data.

Example: Only show items that have a specific Status. If a Test Case Status is "Passed," the corresponding cell or text should be green. Conversely, if it is "Failed," the cell or text should appear in red.

Context-Based Reports: Users can pre-select the data they want to include in the report from a Component, Set, Folder, Filter, Baseline, etc. This feature enhances the report's flexibility.

What skills do you need to create custom reports? 

  1. You are comfortable writing software scripts.
  2. You must navigate a template-tag system integrated directly into Jama Software's internal Velocity API. This involves integrating through sets of items and evaluating each item to determine how it will be handled.
  3. You prefer a simple, text-based interface. As the Velocity tags are embedded in the HTML, you do not need to download special software. You can edit using any text editor of your choice.
  4. The syntax is similar to other embeddable scripting languages, so this method suits users with experience writing scripts.
  5. You would like to run reports on user-specified sets of items. You can generate Velocity reports as “context-sensitive,” which means you can run these reports only against the item or group of items that the user is viewing when the report is generated. This feature expands the capability of running reports across various projects, item types, and other variables.
  6. You would like your report to iterate over sets of items and apply conditional logic. Velocity allows you to specify multiple control flows using conditional statements and loops.

Community Velocity Reports

Community reports are free for customers and provided as-is. They can be accessed in our GitHub Community Reports repository.

 

The available reports include:

  • Upstream Traceability
  • Test Results Report – Grouped by Test Case
  • Test Results Report – Grouped by Test Cycle
  • Review Center Stats Report
  • Sync Status Report

Developing your Velocity Reports

Self-Hosted Customers: Customers using Self-Hosted instances of Jama can develop their reports and upload them to their sites as needed.  

Cloud Customers: Customers can contact Jama Software Support to request that a report be uploaded to their cloud instance.

Note: You must be a Named Support Contact (NSC) to submit requests to Jama Software Support. 

Creating a Support Portal Account

Jama Connect Success Programs

At Jama Software, client success is at the forefront of everything we do. Achieve your business goals and accelerate time to value with Jama Connect® Success Programs, which help you align your people, processes, and data to maximize the success of your product development process. Contact your Customer Success Manager if you would like more information.

Extend Jama Connect 

Exporting Content

Basic Document Exports using Microsoft Word

Custom Export Training using Velocity

Custom Report Development Services

References

Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments below.

Related to

Was this article helpful?

0 out of 0 found this helpful

Have more questions? Submit a request

Comments

0 comments

Article is closed for comments.