Before you start

About this tutorial

Business intelligence refers to collecting and analyzing business information. Reports are one main avenue for doing that and a key part of most organizations. Your company collects a lot of data about its business and performance. However, if that data isn't compiled and presented in an orderly way, key decision-makers base their choices on guesswork. By pulling raw data out of those disparate systems and presenting it in an intelligent fashion, those decision-makers can make informed choices that help steer your company in the right direction.

The Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project is a set of open source plug-ins for Eclipse you can use to create compelling reports for Web applications. Using BIRT, you can create dynamic database-driven reports with a full range of formatting capabilities. BIRT V2.0 supports Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Portable Data Format (PDF) report generation, and can embed these reports seamlessly into existing Java™ Platform Enterprise Edition applications. BIRT reports can present data in lists, tables, and myriad chart types.

You can do most of what you need to do with BIRT through the BIRT Report Designer, in which you can drag and drop components to create rich reports. For those cases where you need to go beyond that, BIRT can call Java objects. BIRT is not limited to working with a set number of databases. If you have a data source that isn't Java Database Connectivity (JDBC)-accessible, you can use the Open Data Access framework built into BIRT to write connectors to talk to any data source and present it as a tabular data source.

BIRT reports can combine data from multiple data sources and multiple representations of the same data source all on the same reports. With compound reports, you can combine charts, lists, and other data into one report.

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Objectives

Our goal here is to help you get familiar with BIRT and with the BIRT Report Designer so you're prepared to connect to data sources and create dynamic reports. The tutorial also provides an overview of BIRT's formatting and layout abilities, as well as template-creation capabilities.

Prerequisites

This is written for Java developers who will be generating reports or report developers who will be using BIRT, and whose skills and experience are at a beginning to intermediate level. You should have a general familiarity with Eclipse and installing plug-ins.

System requirements

To run the examples in this tutorial, you must have a system capable of running Eclipse (Microsoft® Windows®, Linux®, Solaris, AIX®, HP-UX, Mac OS X) with at least 200 MB of free disk space.

Download and install the following tools and technologies:

• Java technology from Sun Microsystems or from IBM
• Eclipse SDK V3.1 or later
• The Eclipse Graphical Editor Framework (GEF) V3.1 run time
• The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) V2.1 run time
• The BIRT Report Framework V2.0
• Apache Axis

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Table of contents

• Before you start
• Getting started with BIRT
• Creating dynamic reports
• Customization
• Charts
• Templates
• Summary
• Resources
• About the authors

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