Latest News from Jason Weathersby

BIRT Designer Classpath Changes

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:01:00 EST

Starting with the 2.5.2 branch of BIRT (Release date February 2010), configuring the classpath for the designer has been improved. This classpath setting is used by the BIRT engine when processing reports that use Java event handlers or make calls to

Accessing Spring Beans from the BIRT Designer

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Recently I have described methods that can be used to access Spring Beans from the BIRT Engine. These examples are intended to be illustrative and not comprehensive. In both of these examples I used the BIRT engine to retrieve Spring objects within the scripting environment. In this post I am supplying an example that illustrates how to implement your own menu in the expression builder, so Spring objects can be called within the BIRT Designer. This will allow you to test your report prior to deployment.

It's Movember

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:13:00 EST

Movember, that time of year when the days grow shorter, the weather grows colder and the family gathers today for the holidays. Of course in my family the kids are looking at me and laughing, and I am getting 'that' look from Gretchen my wife.
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More on BIRT and Spring

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:23:00 EST

In my previous post I discussed calling Spring objects within a BIRT report. That example used an architecture similar to the simplified diagram below.

Calling Spring Objects from BIRT Expressions and Event Handlers

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:38:00 EST

Several examples are already available on the web, which demonstrate calling the BIRT engine from a Spring MVC application.

Integrating BIRT with Spring in

Multiple Hyperlinks on BIRT Charts

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:51:00 EDT

BIRT 2.5.1 was released a couple of weeks ago and with its release BIRT Charts now support multiple hyperlinks. To use this feature select any of the interactivity locations within the chart builder. Next select the add button under the hyperlinks list

Calling BIRT reports from Wicket using Actuate’s JSAPI

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:47:00 EDT

I have written several posts on how to use the Actuate JSAPI to integrate with various frameworks. In this post I will detail integrating with Wicket. For more information on the JSAPI see this post:

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Calling BIRT reports from Flex using Actuate’s JSAPI

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:43:00 EDT

Continuing on a series of posts I have written around Acuate’s JSAPI, this post details integrating BIRT reports with Flex. Previous posts detailed:

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Using Script to Modify a BIRT Chart

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:23:00 EDT

When designing BIRT reports that contain charts, the developer has many ways a chart can be customized. One way is to implement a script event handler either in JavaScript or Java. The chart engine currently supports over thirty hooks for implementing

Calling BIRT reports from PHP using Actuate’s JSAPI

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:30:00 EDT

I have written a couple of post on using Actuate’s JSAPI to include BIRT content within your system. This API is AJAX based and allows content to be embedded within most web applications.

These post can read here:
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The Heavy Hand

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:49:00 EDT

Today I received a foundation email with this little nugget in it:

Pursuant to the Eclipse Foundation Bylaws, the Eclipse Foundation recently amended the Eclipse Foundation Bylaws and Membership Agreement. As required by the
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Passing JDBC ResultSet to a report

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:54:00 EDT

Nice article on how to pass a JDBC resultset to a report at

Techie.Ocean

Calling BIRT reports from ASP.NET using Actuate’s JSAPI

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:30:00 EDT

A while back I wrote a blog entry about Actuate’s new JSAPI. This API is AJAX based and allows BIRT reports to be displayed using virtually any front end. The

Change Page Layout

Wed, 27 May 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Been busy writing reports lately, but I thought that I would try to publish a few quick tips that I have turned up.

One of the issues I have faced is that when a report is being formatted for PDF layout, I want it to be constrained to the

BIRT 2.5 M7 New and Notable

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:36:00 EDT

BIRT 2.5 M7 was released earlier this month. This milestone adds features like, default parameter value scripting, the ability to paste HTML and RTF directly into a Text element, and independent Locale formatting. Crosstabs have also been improved to

BIRT Cascaded Parameters

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:30:00 EDT

BIRT provides the capability to use dynamic parameters to present the end user with a list of choices that are populated from a dataset. This is very useful but can cause issues when the dataset returns many rows of data. To reduce the number of items

Multi-Select Parameters - Part 2

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:58:00 EDT

In a previous post I described how you could create a simple method to use multi-select parameters with a SQL IN clause in a generic fashion. In that

BIRT 2.5 M6 New and Notable

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:28:00 EDT

Just wanted to drop a note to say the new and notable for BIRT 2.5 M6 is now available. Some great features are making their way into BIRT 2.5, like z ordering for combination charts, improved 508 compliance, project configuration changes, and better

BIRT Multi-Select Statements

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:46:00 EDT

Note: re-published to fix typos in the opening paragraph. Oh the perils of late night posting.

In BIRT 2.3.1 a new extension point was added to support the creation of user defined functions. Jason has all ready blogged about the

Raising Errors in Event Handlers

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:27:00 EST

Let me start with a simple scenario. You are writing a BIRT event handler and you expect the user to set a UserDefinedProperty that will guide the event handler code. How do you handle the situation where the user forgets to add the

Using BIRT with PHP

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:25:00 EST

Just wanted to post a note saying The Server Side just published an article we worked on that demonstrates how BIRT can be called using PHP. This article covers using the BIRT Report Engine within PHP to implement running and rendering of reports and

Single Sign On with the Actuate BIRT Viewer

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:56:00 EST

In an earlier post (Showing BIRT Reports using the Actuate JSAPI), we talked about using the new Actuate JSAPI to integrate report content within your application

BIRT - Reversing a Chart Scale.

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:08:00 EST

The Chart Engine that is delivered as part of the BIRT project offers a lot of functionality. Not only can you extend most of its features, the chart engine also offers hooks to do scripting (either in Java or JavaScript). Scripting can be very useful

Friday is the last Day for EclipseCon 2009 proposals

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:26:00 EST

I just wanted to put a post up to let everyone know that the deadline for submissions for EclipseCon 2009 has been extended to Friday (11/28/2008 5pm PST). We are still looking for some use case proposals in the Reporting track and would appreciate

BIRT Connection Pooling Continued Again

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:15:00 EST

With the release of BIRT 2.3.1 connection pooling options have been extended.
In a prior post, I built an example that showed how to implement connection pooling using the driverBridge extension point. While this method is useful, with BIRT 2.3.1

Getting BIRT Source

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:36:00 EST

Back in September I blogged about BIRT Team Project Sets. Last week the BIRT team was able to finish up implementing Team Project Sets. Instructions on how to

How to Develop an Application Using the Eclipse BIRT Design Engine API

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:45:00 EDT

This article is the second in a series on developing an application using Eclipse BIRT Engine APIs. It focuses on developing an application using the Eclipse BIRT Design Engine API. The last article focused on the Eclipse BIRT Report Engine API.

Developing an Eclipse BIRT Report Item Extension

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:15:00 EST

The Eclipse platform is an Open Source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. Eclipse provides a set of core plug-ins that configures the basic services for the platform's framework. A platform developer can build and integrate new tools in this application development system.

Developing an Application Using the Eclipse BIRT Report Engine API

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:45:00 EST

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.

Java Feature — Developing an Eclipse BIRT Report Item Extension

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:00:00 EDT