BIRT is an open source business intelligence and reporting tool, built on top of the Eclipse Framework. BIRT is used by developers for building reports that can best represent data and tell a story of that data that is easy to follow. In addition, BIRT can be integrated into a product, to allow that product to provide reporting capabilities. This book will walk the user through the basics of building reports with BIRT and introduce them to the various sections of the BIRT environment.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, is an introduction to BIRT. It gives the reader an idea of the BIRT features, community landscape, and the various websites out there that are dedicated to BIRT.
Chapter 2, Installing BIRT, guides the user through the various ways of installing BIRT.
Chapter 3, The BIRT Environment and First Report, introduces the BIRT workspace environment by walking the reader through a simple report example.
Chapter 4, Visual Report Items, presents us with various visual report items that are available for use in a report design.
Chapter 5, Working with Data, discusses how to retrieve data from databases, flat text files, web services, and other data sources.
Chapter 6, Report Parameters, explains how to get input from the report user, along with how to apply these report parameters in filtering data.
Chapter 7, Report Projects and Libraries, looks at reusing report sections and sharing resources through libraries and report projects.
Chapter 8, Charts, Hyperlinks, and Drilldowns, shows how to build summary data using charts and linking sections of charts to reports. In addition, hyperlinking used in online reports to link and show detailed data in other reports is discussed here.
Chapter 9, Scripting and Event Handling, discusses report generation through event handling, as well as how to manipulate and format data using simple JavaScript expressions. Some advanced scripting examples are provided based on common requests.
Chapter 10, Deployment, looks at how does a developer can get reports out into the world for consumption.
Note
We also have the following two chapters that are available for free download on Packt site:
The chapter Styles, Themes, and Templates, demonstrates the various ways a report developer can format their report using basic formatting, styles and stylesheets, and themes, along with how to reuse report designs through templates. The chapter is available at http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/1667-styles-themes-and-templates.pdf.
The chapter Practical Example: Building Reports for Bugzilla, takes everything covered so far and puts it all together by looking at a project with reporting requirements, and builds a report environment from the ground up. The chapter is available at http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/1667-practical-example-building-reports-for-bugzilla.pdf.
Any of the following BIRT versions will work for this book:
BIRT 2.2.x
BIRT 2.3.x
BIRT 2.5.x
BIRT 2.6
In addition, all the code examples can be downloaded from Packt site.
If you are a Java developer and want to create rich reports using BIRT, then this book is for you. You will need a basic understanding of SQL to follow along.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Create a new report project called BIRT Book Chapter 5 examples."
A block of code will be set as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Employees xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Employee> <firstName>John</firstName> <lastName>Ward</lastName> <jobTitle>Developer</jobTitle>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "Under the Data Explorer pane, right- click on Data Sources and select New Data Source".
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