BIRT 2.3 Milestone 5 New and Notable Features

BIRT 2.3 Milestone 5 has been released and contains many new features. Top among them is the new JavaScript debugger. You can setup a debug launch configuration to run a report in the current instance of eclipse, or you can specify a different BIRT location. In addition you specify which Report Engine Task to run while debugging. These include the Run, RunAndRender, and the RenderTask. You can also set the debugger to do a Run and then a Render Task. These options allow you to recreate the deployed environment. For example when using the frameset servlet mapping in the example Web Viewer, the engine performs a Run Task to generate the report document and then performs a Render Task on the report document. When debugging a report you can specify the Run+Render option to reproduce this behavior in the debugger. The debugger also includes breakpoints, expressions, and variables and supports stepping through either Java or JavaScript event handlers.



The JavaScript editor has also been improved to support code folding, breakpoints, and JavaScript validation. To read more about these features and others available in the 2.3 M5 release, go here.