Often, report development involves repetitive tasks. Things such as report headers, commonly used datasets and data sources, formatting, and other elements are used in many different reports. This is where libraries come into play. When using libraries, report developers can store commonly used components for later reuse. It is also a useful tool when working in groups.
The concepts of reuse and group development are often overlooked in report development, and this seems to be all but entirely ignored with BIRT. However, if we have worked in a report development group, it is an all too often needed functionality. When I was working in a large report development group, the data that got pulled was often the same, if not similar, to previous report requests, with modification to visual layouts, or modified parameters. Another scenario that was common was to develop reports only to find out that someone had done the same report several months ago. With BIRT's report libraries, these...