More on BIRT and Spring

In my previous post I discussed calling Spring objects within a BIRT report. That example used an architecture similar to the simplified diagram below.



The Spring Context was injected in the BIRT app context and this gave the BIRT scripting environment access to the Spring Beans. This example could have been expanded further to the Open Source BIRT Viewer by adding a similar object to the Application Context for the BIRT Viewer. See this wiki page for more details. If you use the method described in the wiki page, you may prefer to implement this with a Spring RequestContextFilter.

The simplified architecture for this setup is presented below.



Another option is to use Spring Remoting and the Open Source BIRT Viewer tag libraries or standard URL integration. In this case you add the Spring jars to the WEB-INF/lib of the viewer and write a wrapper class for the Spring remote client. The wrapper class and Spring configuration file can then be added to the WEB-INF/lib directory of the Viewer to access your remote beans. The architecture for this setup would be as follows. Attached to this post is an example of this method.



If you are using the Actuate Java Components technology, you can use the JSAPI within a standard HTML page or generate it in a Spring View which will include the BIRT report. This approach allows Flash charts to be populated by Spring Beans and report interactivity like dynamically grouping, sorting and filtering all without re-executing the report.



The example, that is attached to this post, is a very simple Spring Remoting example. It contains two ANT projects, one for the server application and one that acts as the remote client wrapper. Once you download the example, build the server application and deploy it. Instructions are in a readme file. Then build the client wrapper jar and deploy it as described in the readme. The readme illustrates deploying to the Open Source BIRT Viewer or the Actuate Interactive Viewer. The example uses Spring HTTP Remoting, but any of the Spring Remoting technologies should work. An example report is provided for both deployed environments. Whether you are using the Open Source BIRT Report designer or the Actuate BIRT Designer, the expression to access the Spring Bean will be similar to the following.



Output for the example is as follows.

Open Source Viewer


Actuate Interactive Viewer


The Example is available at BIRT Exchange.