BIRT: general info and initial experience Katia 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 ?