BIRT: general info and initial experience

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BIRT general info and initial experience

• Katia Danilova
• 02/27/2008

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BIRT

• Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools
• Eclipse Foundations project
• Aims to take report development into the age of
  the internet
• supports two releases (2.1.3 and 2.2)

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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)

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BIRT Reports

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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BIRT Components

• BIRT Report Designer
• Design Engine
• Report Engine

• Charting Engine
• BIRT Viewer

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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 ?