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Mon, 24 June 2013 04:52

Eclipse User

We are currently evaluating BIRT for our use and we've moved on from working throught the tutorials to attempting to create reports from our own typical data. This test data frequently takes the form of Excel or XML and the format or layout is not under our control. This data often contains many rows of headers and preamble before the data rows. What we would like to be able to do is specify the start row to import from and the range or last row of the block of data.

Is this possible?

As far as we have been able to find out from the documentation and internet searches, using Excel as a data source implies that the first row is for column headings, the second for the data type and all the remaining rows are for data only. This is a big stumbling block for us since for cost and quality reasons we will not be reformatting the data prior to creating reports using BIRT.

Thanks for your help.

Re: Excel import [message #1065665 is a reply to message #1065074]

Thu, 27 June 2013 01:26

Eclipse User

You might take a look into this community plugin available in the BIRT Exchange devShare:

BIRT Exchange DevShare - Spreadsheet Data Source Plug-In

It defines a starting and ending row.

Re: Excel import [message #1065920 is a reply to message #1065665]

Fri, 28 June 2013 06:34

Eclipse User

Thanks for that link Michael, I've got it installed now and I'm trying to see if it makes a difference.

Currently I can only import data as strings. If I change the data type either when creating the data source with the second line as type option ticked, or by editing the data set entries the preview throws up errors. Typically saying it can't convert one data type to another, including bizarrely, can't convert integer to integer!

Re: Excel import [message #1066884 is a reply to message #1065920]

Fri, 05 July 2013 00:57

Eclipse User

That plug-in was from a contest from a while back. I'm not sure if the author is still fixing issues or not. What's your BIRT version? I'll have to give it a try. Any way you can attach an example report and XLS file that will show me the issue you're seeing?

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