Accessing a BIRT report

Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) is an Eclipse-based reporting system that allows for sophisticated output in PDF or HTML format, including graphics, tables, graphs, and charts. EGL support for BIRT is will be available when you code programs generated for Java™; but that support is not available in version .7 of the Eclipse IDE for EGL Developers.

You can begin designing your output by opening the Report Design perspective of the Workbench and creating a Report project. Alternatively, you can do all your work in an EGL or web project.

You create a report, which (in the context of your output-design work) is an XML file whose default extension is .rptdesign. The steps are as follows:
  1. Click File or right click on the project
  2. Select New > Other
  3. At the Select a Wizard dialog, choose Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools > Report
  4. Specify a parent folder and report name, and click Next
  5. At the New Report dialog, select a template that will be the basis of your report. Help is available if you press the question icon, and details on report design will be displayed subsequently if you check Show Report Creation Cheat Sheet.
  6. Click Finish.
  7. Your subsequent tasks include specifying a data source (for example, a JDBC connection), specifying a data set (for example, the database columns specified in an SQL SELECT statement), and using a palette to drag and drop elements such as labels and tables. You can rely on the cheat sheet and can get a fuller introduction to report design by accessing the tutorial and background detail at the following website:

      http://www.eclipse.org/birt

Working at the EGL or web perspective, you create EGL code that drives output creation. The creation can have two steps:
  1. The report (hereafter called the design file) is converted to a second file, called a document file, which has a default extension of .rptdocument and contains data in an intermediate format
  2. The document file is converted to the PDF or HTML output
Two other choices are possible, to speed processing:
The basic idea for working with BIRT in EGL is as follows:

You can use a cascading style sheet (CSS) to control display characteristics of the report.