By Jason Weathersby The advanced BIRT Roadshows will begin next week in Boston, New York and DC.These events feature a free day of training on advanced BIRT topics, like understanding the event model, chart and report item scripting, implementing high performance Sep. 8, 2010 12:31 PM EDT Reads: 706 |
By Jason Weathersby BIRT has many ways to include images within a report. Images can be used in BIRT styles, as watermarks, in text elements, and placed within the report using an image report item. In this post I will cover some of the details needed to work with images Sep. 2, 2010 10:10 AM EDT Reads: 1,740 |
By Jason Weathersby In my last post I blogged about how Chart Scripting works in BIRT. If you are using Aug. 20, 2010 11:52 AM EDT Reads: 1,660 |
By Jason Weathersby I recently stumbled across a project that has BIRT reports about Perforce. It looks like if you are using Perforce for your version control, you can now use BIRT reports to gain insight into that system. Aug. 16, 2010 06:48 PM EDT Reads: 1,111 |
By Jason Weathersby The BIRT Chart Engine currently supports building and running charts within the BIRT designer or externally. The engine is fully extensible using the Eclipse extension mechanisms and supports client side interactivity and server side event scripting. Aug. 12, 2010 02:01 PM EDT Reads: 2,080 |
By Jason Weathersby Don't you love it when technology just works? I recently had this experience when I moved a couple of BIRT projects to Eclipse Labs. I have moved all of my BIRT projects that Aug. 3, 2010 06:04 PM EDT Reads: 709 |
By Jason Weathersby  One of the most common questions for people that are new to BIRT is about how to ask data from the DataSet in the report. The question is when building expressions should I use dataSetRow["FIELD"] or row["FIELD"]?
So let me see if I can set the record straight. When data is acq... Jul. 26, 2010 12:38 PM EDT Reads: 6,218 |
By Jason Weathersby  Recently I had the opportunity to figure out how to manipulate sizing, positioning and text wrapping of chart legends so I thought I'd share what I learned.
If you have a chart with legend items that don't fit in the available space, BIRT will do one of two things, depending on the wr... Jul. 20, 2010 10:00 PM EDT Reads: 4,368 |
By Jason Weathersby Thanks to all those who attended the New BIRT 2.6 Features in Helios webinar. The recording is available on Eclipse Live. The examples used in the webinar are available at Jul. 8, 2010 04:32 PM EDT Reads: 821 |
By Jason Weathersby BIRT 2.6 is now available and with this release many improvements and new features are available. Charting with BIRT has been improved adding support for a Radar/Polar chart type, palette hash patterns, better JPG quality, and improved SVG to PDF support Jun. 23, 2010 09:26 AM EDT Reads: 1,040 |
By Jason Weathersby  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 ... Jun. 10, 2010 01:30 PM EDT Reads: 5,294 |
By Jason Weathersby  BIRT 2.5.2 provides a variety of tools to construct reports to analyze data. These include charts, aggregation elements, drill to detail capabilities, nested tables, data cubes and crosstabs. These features are presented very well in the AJAX based viewer when deployed to the web, supp... Jun. 2, 2010 03:26 PM EDT Reads: 12,139 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 May. 20, 2010 03:39 PM EDT Reads: 674 |
By Jason Weathersby In an earlier post we examined chart interactivity with a focus on the Invoke Script Action, which allowed client side scripts to be called. This post is available May. 6, 2010 12:39 PM EDT Reads: 537 |
By Jason Weathersby BIRT currently supports the concept of a multi-view report item. What this means is that two report items share the same data bindings and physical space, but only one is displayed. In the current version of BIRT only tables and crosstabs support this Apr. 22, 2010 12:26 PM EDT Reads: 809 |
By Jason Weathersby In the past year Actuate has been running free one day BIRT training events, where users are introduced to BIRT technology by a series of talks followed by some hands on training exercises. This road show series, which was conducted in major cities Mar. 28, 2010 05:30 PM EDT Reads: 765 |
By Jason Weathersby  BIRT offers several ways reports can be deployed. The AJAX based BIRT viewer can be deployed to your application server, the BIRT tag libraries can be used or you can deploy the Report Engine in your application. You can also modify any of the above options, given that the source is av... Feb. 22, 2010 05:04 PM EST Reads: 9,659 |
By Jason Weathersby We have updated the BIRT Functions and BIRT Controls libraries today to support versions 2.3.2 and 2.5.1. Turns out that there were some minor changes that needed to be addressed. In addition, we did a bit of work to make the naming and Feb. 18, 2010 05:27 PM EST Reads: 1,036 |
By Jason Weathersby I read about the Remus project on Planet Eclipse today and was intrigued Feb. 2, 2010 05:49 PM EST Reads: 632 |
By Jason Weathersby For those who attended the Webinar we did this week, I am attaching the slides and examples. They are available at BIRT Exchange. Jan. 28, 2010 01:48 PM EST Reads: 586 |
By Jason Weathersby  If you are using Actuate's JSAPI to run BIRT reports and you wish to pass parameters from a SEAM component this can be done very easily. In addition you can combine SEAM remoting with the JSAPI to do some interesting things. For example assume we create a SEAM component that retrieves ... Jan. 15, 2010 12:29 PM EST Reads: 6,924 |
By Jason Weathersby One of the best ways to debug your BIRT Expressions and JavaScript is logging. I have worked with a number of different techniques for logging, and finally settled on using the script functions to create a logging utility. This approach can Jan. 13, 2010 03:02 PM EST Reads: 2,288 |
By Jason Weathersby Blackboard, Inc. develops solutions for the K-12 school, college campus, workplace, and community that increase Dec. 14, 2009 01:18 PM EST Reads: 3,552 |
By Jason Weathersby  A couple of months ago I detailed a new feature for BIRT charts that allows multiple hyperlinks to be attached to one the supported events. That post is available Dec. 12, 2009 03:00 PM EST Reads: 8,771 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 Dec. 1, 2009 05:01 PM EST Reads: 1,677 |
By Jason Weathersby  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 ... Nov. 25, 2009 01:45 PM EST Reads: 7,545 |
By Jason Weathersby 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. Nov. 13, 2009 11:13 PM EST Reads: 792 |
By Jason Weathersby In my previous post I discussed calling Spring objects within a BIRT report. That example used an architecture similar to the simplified diagram below. Nov. 12, 2009 02:23 PM EST Reads: 4,324 |
By Jason Weathersby Several examples are already available on the web, which demonstrate calling the BIRT engine from a Spring MVC application.Integrating BIRT with Spring in Nov. 5, 2009 10:38 AM EST Reads: 1,894 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 Oct. 20, 2009 02:51 PM EDT Reads: 2,376 |
By Jason Weathersby 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: Sep. 28, 2009 09:47 PM EDT Reads: 3,299 |
By Jason Weathersby Continuing on a series of posts I have written around Acuate’s JSAPI, this post details integrating BIRT reports with Flex. Previous posts detailed: Sep. 3, 2009 02:43 PM EDT Reads: 4,228 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 Aug. 26, 2009 04:23 PM EDT Reads: 2,761 |
By Jason Weathersby 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: Aug. 13, 2009 05:30 PM EDT Reads: 3,031 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 Jul. 9, 2009 12:49 PM EDT Reads: 801 |
By Jason Weathersby Nice article on how to pass a JDBC resultset to a report at Techie.Ocean Jun. 26, 2009 12:54 PM EDT Reads: 881 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 Jun. 12, 2009 04:30 PM EDT Reads: 3,359 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 May. 27, 2009 12:15 PM EDT Reads: 696 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 May. 18, 2009 10:36 AM EDT Reads: 940 |
By Jason Weathersby 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 Apr. 30, 2009 05:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,970 |
Jason Weathersby is a member of the extended BIRT development team at Actuate Corporation and has backgrounds in both computer science and technical writing. He has many years experience in technical consulting, training, writing, and publishing about reporting, business intelligence tools, and database technologies.
