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Question Integrate BIRT With Our Struts Application

We would like to integrate BIRT with our Struts application seamlessly to replace our home grown reports module. In order to do that we would like all the reports generated by BIRT confirm to our Struts tiles layout which is used by rest of the application. The Content tile of the layout should display the html emitted by BIRT report engine (while other tiles will display the header with menus and footers with links etc).

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toba_sayed
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847 views

Question Integrate BIRT With Our Struts Application

We would like to integrate BIRT with our Struts application seamlessly to replace our home grown reports module. In order to do that we would like all the reports generated by BIRT confirm to our Struts tiles layout which is used by rest of the application. The Content tile of the layout should display the html emitted by BIRT report engine (while other tiles will display the header with menus and footers with links etc).

Uploaded by

toba_sayed
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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We would like to integrate BIRT with our Struts application seamlessly to replace our home

grown reports module. In order to do that we would like all the reports generated by BIRT
confirm to our Struts tiles layout which is used by rest of the application. The Content tile of
the layout should display the html emitted by BIRT report engine (while other tiles will display
the header with menus and footers with links etc).

We would also like to create a custom "Run Reports" page that accepts the report parameters
which when submitted to our Struts Action will be passed to the Reporting Engine. Using this
custom "Run Reports" page, we would also like to control what columns will be displayed in
the reports (Is this possible with BIRT? I understand we can pass parameters to filter records
but can we control show/hide columns?)

In order to provide such a solution we explored all things BIRT and finally settled on using
Report Engine API to generate html reports. We could successfully generate simple reports
with moderate size data sets. However, we are not able to generate a report that supports
progressive viewing ( i.e., First, Prev, Next, Last link based navigation to browse the result
set).

We looked up the Report Engine API Documentation to understand how HTMLActionHandler


or IPageHandler or some other component could be used to implement progressive viewing.
We also downloaded source code from eclipse.org CVS for clues on implementation.

We are now at a point where we by ourselves cannot find or provide a solution for
progressive viewing. We very much appreciate if you could point us in the right direction or
provide us some code snippets that would help us implement progressive viewing.

Other Questions

1) How does BIRT generate a report that has 100K records or more and display 50 per page?
Does it first fetch all 100K records and cache them before it displays the first page? Or does it
do some magic to fetch only 50 records at a time when a next page button is clicked?

2) Is there a way to tell the Report Engine (using API) to use DiskCache instead of the
SmartCache which is a RAM based cache?

3) Is there a way to export Report data into MS-Excel? I know BIRT supports CSV format but
we would like to have MS OLE Document format (similar to the one that is generated via
Apache POI HSSF).

4) How can we tell the Report Engine (using API) to use a database connection pool used by
rest of our web application?

5) How to add First, Prev, Next, Last links to the BIRT report generated by Reporting Engine
API to implement progressive viewing? Can we do the same with Report Designer?

6) How to control show/hide column(s) using Report Engine API? Can we do the same with
Report Designer?

7) What are Named Expressions and User Properties? Can we use them to provide a solution
for the above two questions?

8) Is there a place where we can download/browse detailed BIRT API documentation or user
guide?

9) Are there any significant features in Release 2.1 that would help us better integrate BIRT
with our web application? If we go ahead with BIRT 2.0.1 to implement above-mentioned
features, can we migrate to BIRT 2.1 easily? Or does it involve total rewrite of our integration
code?

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