BIRT: general info and initial experienceKatia Danilova

02/27/2008

BIRT

Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools

Eclipse Foundation’s project Aims to “take report

development into the age of the internet”

supports two releases (2.1.3 and 2.2)

BIRT Developers Not required:

to be an expert in creating reports years of programming experience

Need to have basic knowledge of: HTML (for formatting) SQL (to write basic queries to extract data for the report)

Even more beneficial to know: JavaScript (to write basic expressions to manipulate data in the

report) Java (for business logic)

BIRT Reports

BIRT reports consist of four main parts: data data transforms business logic presentation

BIRT: Data

Databases, web services, Java objects, flat files Support for using code to get at other sources of

data One report can include data from many data

sources. separate data sources can be combined using

inner and outer joins.

BIRT: Data Transforms

data can be sorted, summarized, filtered and grouped to fit the user's needs. databases can do some of this work, but query may

become too complicated especially beneficial if we have "simple" data sources

such as flat files or Java objects. BIRT allows more sophisticated operations such

as grouping on sums, percentages of overall totals and more.

BIRT: Business Logic

Many reports require business-specific logic to convert raw data into information useful for the user.

If the logic is just for the report, you can script it using BIRT's JavaScript support.

If your application already contains the logic, you can call into your existing Java code.

BIRT: Presentation

Once the data is ready, you have a wide range of options for presenting it to the user:

Text and dynamic text Lists Grids Tables Cross Tabs Charts of many types …

BIRT Components

BIRT Report Designer Design Engine Report Engine

Charting Engine BIRT Viewer

BIRT: my likes and dislikes Good

Different data sources Different output formats Saves time when creating

advanced/complicated reports for programmers

Allows to create simple reports for non programmers just by drag and drop

Flash tutorials/examples at Eclipse BIRT webpage

Bad Installation issues BIRT seems to be

"memory intensive“ Learning curve Manuals and Help

for 2.2 ?