BIRT Notes: April 27, 2007

Once again the primary focus has been on the new CrossTab. At the PMC, it was noted that the CrossTab should be in pretty good shape by the RC0 build mid-May.

The PMC also discussed supporting BIRT on additional OS platforms. Specifically Windows Vista and Mac OS-X were discussed. One of the goals for the 2.2.1 release will be to provide testing and validation guidelines so that we can have "Community Certified" Reference Platforms.

It looks like we are getting down to the last items in the iText IP review process. The foundation IP reviewers found a couple of remaining issues which have been fixed in the latest build of BIRT. If you are pulling BIRT from head, you will need to get iText 1.5.1 which is available at:
CLASS FILES: http://itext.ugent.be/library/downloads/itext-1.5.1.jar

Here is the list of notable changes:

- ParamDef tag for WebTools
can help user to create report parameter and generate html code.

- Fix Hyperlinks to internal bookmark in excel emitter.

- Parameter Sort Issue (under Show Report Parameters) - 165025
1.On parameter dialog, when defing dynamic parameter place combos to let user choosing sort key and sort direction, place a check box to let user setting if allow duplicate values.
2.Redesign the layout of parameter dialog, keep the dialog not growing bigger while placing sort related controls.

- Support more than eight colors in the Palette
Rollback the change to update() method in Platte to keep backward compatibility and add new method shift() to support 32 colors in palette.

- Add Tube/Cone/Pyramid as chart Types Bugzilla: 181711

- Add a switch to determine whether to clean viewer image folder when session expires Bugzilla Bug 183919
Add a new URL parameter named __clean to indicate whether clean session temp files. Default value is true.

- Optimized transaction usage in model api to improve performance

- Change report item data binding to be named based
Make report item share data binding by the name. If the data binding reference property is set, it takes high priority than local values. Column bindings, filters, sorts, parameter bindings can be shared among report items by data binding reference.

- Use Default Values in cascading parameter group Bugzilla Bug 178682
When retrieve and show the cascading parameter value list, focus on the default value.

- Data engine changes to support result set sharing
A field needCache is added to Dte query definition show weather the result iterator need to be cached. If need cahce the data will be saved in temporary file before the result iterator is closed. The saved result iterator can be loaded by queryResultID.