BIRT Notes: March 31 2007

Howdy All,

I have been following the Aptana project and have noticed that they run a weekly update on their development efforts. I found this very useful, then it occurred as I was scanning the daily BIRT dev mailer that maybe we should do the same thing for the BIRT project. So what you are reading is the first week of an experiment where Jason Weathersby and I wrap up the weeks activities for the BIRT project.

This is still a bit of a work in progress, the amount of information that makes it in is still somewhat open. Basically, what I do is scan all the topics from the weekly PMC meeting, and read all of the birt-dev mail notes. If I see something interesting, I throw it in the list. I have not included the names of the committers that did the work, I will try to do that next week.

If you have any thoughts or comments, please let us know.

BIRT Notes: March 31, 2007

Support for Apple OS X
The PMC has started the process of providing support for OS X as one of our certified platforms. At this time we are looking for an appropriate partner(s) that will be able to perform testing on the Mac. We are in the process of identifying the specifics for the testing and in discussion with a couple of possible contributors. At this point, it appears that the major stumbling block will be the amount of manual testing that is required as part of the BIRT test procedure.

Process Pages Community member Daniel John Debrunner has been raising some interesting questions about the BIRT development process. We have provided documentation on the BIRT web site that outlines our development process so that it is more open to the rest of the community. Our goal is to build the BIRT product in the most open way that we can, hopefully our process allows the community visibility and access to the inner workings of the project. Please have a look and provide comments or questions.
BIRT Wiki - New Examples / Categories
As outlined in the previous post on this site, a significant amount of work has happened on the BIRT Wiki site, particularly in the examples area.

BIRT M6 Build
The M6 build is scheduled for next week. A lot of great new features have made it into the product and the developers are working on closing out approximately 70 open bugs over the next week. The most significant additions to the M6 build will be the addition of the CrossTab and the new Word and Excel emitters. The BIRT crosstab will be in the M6 build, but it is truly not ready for prime time yet, our target is to have the CrossTab ready for comments by the RC0 build, if you are interested have a look in the M6 build.

The following represent a list of Bugzilla fixes that represent a significant change in functionality.

• New feature to allow row level filtering in the XPath mapping expression. (175347)

• Add Export Report and Print report on the server functions in the Web Viewer. (175636, 158748). To turn off Print Server Side function, please set BIRT_VIEWER_PRINT_SERVERSIDE setting in web.xml to OFF.

• Add “Report and Chart Design” view in core.ui. (BPS79, 173238)

• Add support for the application of styles in the table of contents (numerous)
• Support Date/Time data type in BIRT report engine. (177693)

• Supports "isRequired" property on parameter dialog, drop the allownull and allowblank properties. If isRequired isn't checked, allow user to set null value to parameter. (156012)

• Improved Log Support 147863 Add getLogger/setLogger to:

Org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.EngineConfig

Org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.IReportEngine

Org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.IEngineTask.

• Chart Simple API (BPS66, 159514, 177282)
• Improved Fit to Page for PostScript and PDF emitters
• First version of incremental caching of BIRT data engine. In this version we do not support idea of persistent caching. We only support session based caching.