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BIRT: general info and initial experience. Katia Danilova 02/27/2008. 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. BIRT Developers. Not required:
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BIRT: general info and initial experience Katia Danilova 02/27/2008
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
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.
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: Presentation
BIRT Report Designer Design Engine Report Engine Charting Engine BIRT Viewer BIRT Components
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 ? BIRT: my likes and dislikes