Eclipse Community Forums: BIRT » HTML Emitter and CSS

Home » Archived » BIRT » HTML Emitter and CSS

Tue, 21 June 2005 18:01

Eclipse User

I have successfully embedded the ReportEngine in our web application
(running on Weblogic, had to turn on "prefer web-inf classes" because of
a conflict involving different versions of Rhino, I think). I want to
generate HTML reports inside our main application UI (currently a
servlet includes a header.jsp, then runs the report, then includes a
footer.jsp). I haven't had much time to look into making the report
style fit the main application style... but I already see one problem:

If invoke setEmbeddable(true) on
org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.HTMLRenderOption, it turns on a "No
CSS" mode, which is not exactly what I want. Our internal requirements
for web applications say that styles are to be defined by CSS only.

I would like the report to keep using CSS for styles, but skip the HTML
head, body and other tags so it could be included inside a larger HTML
page. I realize there could be conflicts with CSS names, but I'd like to
have that option available. Ideally, I would like to be able to specify
the CSS class names (and id attribute values) that our main application
uses in the Report Designer (maybe that's possible, I haven't really
explored all the styles options in the Report Designer)

Erkki Lindpere

Re: HTML Emitter and CSS [message #51726 is a reply to message #48902]

Mon, 27 June 2005 13:07

Eclipse User

Hi, Erkki,

Thanks for your feedback on using the embeddable HTML! You are correct on
using "prefer web-inf classes" with Web-logic too, as that is what we
recommend.

Technically, it is fairly easy for us to keep the CSS and strip off the
body/header tags. However, where should we put the style definitions? They
do not seem to be able to go into the generated HTML file. Can you provide
us more information on how you plan to integrate the style sheets?

Stanley Wang
BIRT Engine

Re: HTML Emitter and CSS [message #52462 is a reply to message #51726]

Tue, 28 June 2005 13:09

Eclipse User

Stanley Wang wrote:

> Thanks for your feedback on using the embeddable HTML! You are correct
> on using "prefer web-inf classes" with Web-logic too, as that is what we
> recommend.
> Technically, it is fairly easy for us to keep the CSS and strip off the
> body/header tags. However, where should we put the style definitions?
> They do not seem to be able to go into the generated HTML file. Can you
> provide us more information on how you plan to integrate the style sheets?
> Stanley Wang
> BIRT Engine

Thanx for the reply. I must admit my first message wasn't very thought
through. We have a tight schedule at the moment, but when I have more
time to work on improving the report embedding and have studied the
style options in BIRT a bit more, I'll get back to you.

On a related note:
Sometimes the design-time JDBC connection properties need to be
different from runtime properties. It would be ideal if an existing JDBC
connection used by our application could be used for running the report.
Or at least look up a DataSource from a JNDI context during runtime for
obtaining the connection.
I have the idea of making a copy of the current JDBC plugin and
modifying it to do one of these two things (perhaps letting me define
the JNDI name of a datasource to be used at runtime), but I haven't
looked at the ODA code yet.

Erkki

Re: HTML Emitter and CSS [message #53184 is a reply to message #52462]

Fri, 01 July 2005 15:29

Eclipse User

Erkki Lindpere wrote:
> Thanx for the reply. I must admit my first message wasn't very thought
> through. We have a tight schedule at the moment, but when I have more
> time to work on improving the report embedding and have studied the
> style options in BIRT a bit more, I'll get back to you.

I thought about this a little, and I only came up with this:

1) Provide a completely "style-less" emitter option. An application can
then define the styles just for some tags or depending on which div they
are in. It would make the style designing in BIRT somewhat useless, but
I think it would be a good idea to have more run-time flexibility.

2) Allow the designer to define what id and/or class names will be used
(why couldn't the custom style names be used in the HTML output?), or
maybe even import a CSS file. But that would probably mean a lot of
changes to the current code?

Erkki

Previous Topic:	Bugzilla reports using BIRT
Next Topic:	last birt cvs and eclispe 3.1

Goto Forum:

-=] Back to Top [=-

Current Time: Fri May 09 19:29:03 EDT 2025

.:: Contact :: Home ::.

Breadcrumbs

Sign up to our Newsletter