Jason Weathersby

The Eclipse platform is an open source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. The Eclipse Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a set of plug-in extensions that enable a developer to add reporting functionality to an application. BIRT provides a Report Engine API that a developer can use to create a customized report generator application. The org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api package contains a set of interfaces and implementation classes that supports integrating the runtime part of BIRT into an application. The BIRT Report Engine can provide report generation and rendering services in the following environments: Stand-alone engine: A Java developer uses a stand-alone engine to render a BIRT report from a report design (.rptdesign) file. In this environment, the Java developer create... (more)

Calling BIRT reports from Flex using Actuate’s JSAPI

Continuing on a series of posts I have written around Acuate’s JSAPI, this post details integrating BIRT reports with Flex. Previous posts detailed: Showing BIRT Reports using the Actuate JSAPI See this link for more details on what is available in the JSAPI. Calling BIRT Reports from PHP using Actuate’s JSAPI Calling BIRT Reports from ASP.NET using Actuate’s JSAPI BIRT Reports can contain Flash components using the Text element. Actuate has also extended the BIRT report designer to include Flash charts. As stated in previous post the JSAPI can be used to include BIRT content in just abo... (more)

More on BIRT and Spring

In my previous post I discussed calling Spring objects within a BIRT report. That example used an architecture similar to the simplified diagram below. The Spring Context was injected in the BIRT app context and this gave the BIRT scripting environment access to the Spring Beans. This example could have been expanded further to the Open Source BIRT Viewer by adding a similar object to the Application Context for the BIRT Viewer. See this wiki page for more details. If you use the method described in the wiki page, you may prefer to implement this with a Spring RequestContextFilter.... (more)

Adventures with Fonts

One of the biggest problems facing report developers is how to efficiently support multiple languages using multiple output formats (HTML, PDF, Excel...) BIRT provides support for multiple languages but the support is both OS and output format dependent. Having gone through this process a couple of times, I have been asked to share my experiences, hopefully it will simplify the task if you run into similar issues. What I knew going in was that fonts are handled differently depending on the type of output. HTML fonts are rendered in the users browser, PDF fonts are rendered on the... (more)

Conditional Table Filters

Just ran across this and it is a nice technique for those situations where you are limited to table based filtering of data. Typically, I focus on data filtering as far up stream as possible. It is better to filter data at the source (in the where clause for JDBC). Next, I use DataSet based filtering. But sometimes you can't filter at the Source or the DataSet, which is where table based filtering comes in. The issue with table based filters is that there is no good way in the UI to implement conditional filtering. For instance, imagine you have a data driven parameter multi-select... (more)