Designing High Performance BIRT Reports

Over the last couple of months BIRT-Exchange has hosted many webinars explaining and demonstrating BIRT technology. Last weeks webinar featured Mica Block discussing BIRT performance. In this presentation, Mica explains how to gauge performance and provides tips for improving generation time. If you missed it or any of the others, they are available
here.

In addition the following topics will be discussed in the future:

5/30/2008
Using the BIRT Report Engine API
Virgil Dodson

6/13/2008
Using the BIRT Design Engine API
Jason Weathersby

6/27/2008
What's New with BIRT 2.3
Virgil Dodson

7/11/2008
Ad-hoc BIRT Reporting for End Users
Rob Murphy

7/25/2008
BIRT Charting Primer
Virgil Dodson

8/8/2008
Using the BIRT Chart API
Jason Weathersby

Embed HTML

So this is a really simple problem that Jason solved for me. If you have HTML in your database and you want to embed it into your report as HTML you need to do a few things. First start with a Text control.

1) Change the top drop-down to HTML

2) Change the second drop-down to Dynamic Text

3) Click on the tag and use the expression builder to select the appropriate field.





4) Manually insert the attribute format="HTML" into the VALUE-OF entity













If you follow these steps your HTML text will show up in your report document as formatted text that obeys the HTML rules.

Java Event Handler ClassPaths

One of the most common questions that comes up when developing Java Event Handlers is:

"Where do I put my classes?"

Rather than write it up here, I added an entry to the BIRT FAQ here.

BIRT: Swapping Data Set at Runtime

Often it is a requirement to design a report against a development database and then switch the connection at runtime. This can be done in many ways with BIRT. The options include:

JNDI - Look up the data source.
Property Binding - Swap the data source at runtime using property binding expression.
Script – Write a script in the beforeOpen event handler to modify the data source properties.
Connection Profiles – Store the connection information in a shared profile.
DTP driverBridge extension – Implement a driverBridge extension to intercept calls to a specific driver.
Design Engine API (DE API) - Swap the dataset property on a specific table before running the report.

Using the DE API often serves as a useful alternative, because the data sources may be different types. For example your deployed report may use a scripted data source to retrieve some EJB value, but at design time you may not have access to this data source. So you could develop a stubbed data source that uses JDBC to test your report layout and when deployed swap the data set on elements that are bound to the data set. To do this you need to do a few things. First name your elements that use the data set to be swapped. This can be set in the general properties for each report element. Next make sure your two data sets (one for design time and one for deploy time) have the same result columns. If the result columns are not the same much more work needs to be done in order to implement this solution. Finally implement a beforeFactory script that modifies the report design before it is executed. Assume we have two data sources/data sets and one table. If I name my table “mytable” and my data sets are named “viewer” and “designer” the beforeFactory event script would look as follows:

des = reportContext.getHttpServletRequest().getParameter("__designer");

if( des == null || des == "false" ){
   mytable = reportContext.getReportRunnable().designHandle.getDesignHandle().findElement("mytable");
 mytable.setProperty( "dataSet", "viewer" );
}

Note that the “designer” data set is the default data set used in the report. This is the data set that you should drag to the canvas to build your report


The first line of code determines whether we are using the designer. The designer adds the __designer parameter to URL when the report is previewed. This parameter will not exist when deployed. If this parameter does not exist or is set to false we assume that the report is deployed. This line:

reportContext.getReportRunnable().designHandle.getDesignHandle()

returns the report design handle. BIRT 2.3 has an easier way of getting the report design, but this method should work for BIRT 2.2 and 2.3. We then use the report design handle to locate the table element to be modified. Finally we set the dataSet property to the viewer dataset.


An example report illustrating this concept is located here.

BIRT Drill Through

BIRT supports drilling down from a master report to a detail report. To facilitate this feature, BIRT provides a Hyperlink Options builder.



To drill from a table data element, the developer can select the data element, choose the hyperlink property and click on the ellipsis. This will launch the Hyperlink builder. Once the builder is launched, select the Drill-through radial, select either a report design or report document to drill to and supply any needed parameters. Parameters are often based on the current row value of the master table. That is all that is needed to create a master detail report, but suppose you want the detail report to be based on report parameter or some other variable. One way of accomplishing this task is to call the Design Engine API from script and modify the design at runtime.

For example suppose you have a master report and you want the detail report to be based on report parameter. You could define a report parameter for the master report that contains the name of different report designs to be used as a detail. The follow report parameter illustrates doing this with a static list box parameter. Its values are DetailOne and DetailTwo.



Next select the data element that you want to link, select general properties and name the element. In this example it is named mydataelement.




Finally enter script similar to the following in the beforeFactory script event.
importPackage(Packages.org.eclipse.birt.report.model.api);
importPackage(Packages.org.eclipse.birt.report.model.api.elements);



dataHandle = reportContext.getReportRunnable().designHandle.getDesignHandle().findElement("mydataelement");

ac = StructureFactory.createAction();
ah = dataHandle.setAction( ac );
ah.setLinkType("drill-through");
ah.setReportName( params["detailrpt"].value +".rptdesign");
ah.setTargetFileType("report-design");
ah.setTargetWindow("_blank");
pb = StructureFactory.createParamBinding();
pb.setParamName("order");
pb.setExpression("row[\"ORDERNUMBER\"]");
ah.addParamBinding(pb);





This code creates a drill-through hyperlink on the fly and sets the detail report based on the report parameter with this line of code:

ah.setReportName( params["detailrpt"].value +".rptdesign");






This example is available at
BIRT Exchange.