BIRT Community
Newsgroup
The BIRT newsgroup is for users of the project to ask questions, discuss ideas and so on. Join in and get involved!
- Information and Signup – Guidelines for using the newsgroups. Instructions for signing up.
- news://news.eclipse.org/eclipse.birt – The easiest way to access the newsgroup is using your favorite news reader.
- Simple Web Interface – If you don't have a newsreader, or can't access the NNTP server, use this simple web interface.
- Archive – Eclipse keeps a history of past newsgroup postings for your reference.
- Search the BIRT Newsgroup archives for previously asked questions.
BIRT charting APIs are described elsewhere. (Not yet available.)
Bugzilla
BIRT uses Bugzilla to track bugs and enhancements.
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Report a Bug or Enhancement
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When reporting a bug, please give the exact steps to reproduce the problem.
Please explain what went wrong, and what you expected to happen. For an enhancement,
please explain how you'd use the new feature.
BIRT bugs are often associated with a report design. Please attach your design to your Bugzilla entry.
If you encounter a problem such as "An error occurred", or failure to open views or editors, please attach your Eclipse log file. To see the exception, use Window?Show View?Other. Open the PDE Runtime group and choose Error Log. Within the error log window, find the BIRT exception (if any) that just occurred. Double click on the error in question and you’ll see a stack trace. Paste that into your bug report, preferably as a file attachment.
- Search Bugs – Find BIRT-related bugs using the Bugzilla search facility.
Mailing Lists
Eclipse provides mailing lists for each project. BIRT provides one general-purpose list:
- birt-news (archive) – Notifications to BIRT users about BIRT milestone and stable builds and other noteworthy information.
BIRT also provides mailing lists for developers contributing to BIRT:
- birt-dev (archive) – Development discussions about BIRT of interest to all BIRT committers. Topics include PMC meeting minutes, source code structure, CVS management, and integration among the various BIRT components.
- birt-charting-dev (archive) – Discussions about the charting subproject.
- birt-report-engine-dev (archive) – Discussions about the reporting engine subproject.
- birt-report-designer-dev (archive) – Discussions about the report designer subproject.
Extending BIRT
Want to contribute to the BIRT project?
- Build Instructions – How to download BIRT source and build it.
- Project Information – How the project is structured, who's on the PMC, project roles, etc.
- Mailing List – While the newsgroup is for people who use BIRT, the mailing list is for those who help develop BIRT.
- Contribute Fixes – The first step in contributing to BIRT is to learn the code, and there is no better way to do that then to fix some bugs or add a minor feature. Contribute the code back to the project by attaching it to a Bugzilla entry. Let the team know about the fix via the mailing list.