Eclipse BIRT Exchange, collecting tacit knowledge for the user community

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Eclipse BIRT Exchange, collecting tacit knowledge for the user community

07:41 | Michael Cote | Sep 28th, 2007 7:12pm |

While at the Eclipse Marketing Symposium in Chicago, I caught up Virgil Dodson on the goings on in the BIRT community. BIRT is an Eclipse project that focuses on providing a framework and runtime for reporting; see the previous RedMonk video with Virgil for more detail and a demo.

Virgil’s update is primarily about the new BIRT user community, BIRT Exchange. As Virgil tells and then demos for us, BIRT exchange allows users to not only share tips and trouble-shooting about reports, but also reports themselves and other BIRT “configuration” artifacts.

Tags: Virgil Dodson, BIRT community, BIRT Exchange

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2 Responses to “Eclipse BIRT Exchange, collecting tacit knowledge for the user community”

Pranav:
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:54 am

Hi,

Its nice to meet a BIRT enthusiast. Well i am trying to be one. I am actually working with BIRT and kinda just starter.

I am able to make BIRT reports through Eclipse IDE, but when I need to deploy the reports I am stuck up. I don’t know where BIRT reports will fetch the Database connection string and database related information. I am looking to generalize that Database connection issue, rather hard code any where in report. !!!

Secondly, I need to understand how to deploy them into the web application. Will it be wise to just give a link for the BIRT reports in .jsp pages?

I would appreciate if you could tell me how that could be possible.

Thanks,
Pranav
Virgil:
November 26th, 2007 at 7:01 pm

Hi Pranav,

There are forums specifically for designing and deploying BIRT reports at http://www.birt-exchange.com.

To answer some of your questions, there are several different ways to externalize the data connection in a BIRT report. One way is to use Libraries. This way, you create the Data Source one time and leverage it on many different reports. When you change the Data Source, it changes on all reports that use the library.

Another way, if you’re using a connection pool, is to use the JNDI URL to that pool and control the actual data connection(s) in the pool.

You could also use the property binding. (edit a created data source to see this tab). This allows you to use an expression to build the Driver, URL, user, pass, etc, instead of hard coding these… so you could pass in parameters that control URLs from development to production for example.

Finally, if you are using a connection profile store (from the Data Source Explorer view), you can link to that file so you can control all the properties externally.

As far as web deployment of BIRT reports is concerned, there is an open source viewer that you can get as part of the BIRT runtime or you can use the Interactive Viewer from Actuate to get more end user features for the BIRT reports. There are demos you can watch and download trials at the same URL above.

Virgil