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I understand this mailing list is for Eclipse BIRT Development.
However, the question I have is probably to some one with a better
understand of the eclipse BIRT internals. Hence, I am posting
this here. Apologies for long email and Sorry for any inconvenience.
We would like to integrate BIRT with our Struts
application seamlessly to replace our home grown reports module. In
order to do that we would like all the reports generated by BIRT
confirm to our Struts tiles layout which is used by rest of the
application. The Content tile of the layout should display the html
emitted by BIRT report engine (while other tiles will display the
header with menus and footers with links etc).
We would also like to create a custom "Run Reports" page that
accepts the report parameters which when submitted to our Struts Action
will be passed to the Reporting Engine. Using this custom "Run Reports"
page, we would also like to control what columns will be displayed in
the reports (Is this possible with BIRT? I understand we can pass
parameters to filter records but can we control show/hide columns?)
In order to provide such a solution we explored all things
BIRT and finally settled on using Report Engine API to generate html
reports. We could successfully generate simple reports with moderate
size data sets. However, we are not able to generate a report that
supports progressive viewing (
i.e., First, Prev, Next, Last link based navigation to browse the
result set).
We
looked up the Report Engine API Documentation to understand how
HTMLActionHandler or IPageHandler or some other component could be used
to implement progressive viewing. We also downloaded source code from
eclipse.org CVS for clues on implementation.
We are now at a point where we by ourselves cannot find or provide a solution for progressive viewing.
We very much appreciate if you could point us in the right
direction or provide us some code snippets that would help us implement
progressive viewing.
Other Questions
1) How does BIRT generate a report that has 100K records or
more and display 50 per page? Does it first fetch all 100K records and
cache them before it displays the first page? Or does it do some magic
to fetch only 50 records at a time when a next page button is clicked?
2) Is there a way to tell the Report Engine (using API) to use DiskCache instead of the SmartCache which is a RAM based cache?
3)
Is there a way to export Report data into MS-Excel? I know BIRT
supports CSV format but we would like to have MS OLE Document format
(similar to the one that is generated via Apache POI HSSF).
4) How can we tell the Report Engine (using API) to use a database connection pool used by rest of our web application?
5)
How to add First, Prev, Next, Last links to the BIRT report generated
by Reporting Engine API to implement progressive viewing? Can we do the
same with Report Designer?
6) How to control show/hide column(s) using Report Engine API? Can we do the same with Report Designer?
7) What are Named Expressions and User Properties? Can we use them to provide a solution for the above two questions?
8) Is there a place where we can download/browse detailed BIRT API documentation or user guide?
9)
Are there any significant features in Release 2.1 that would help us
better integrate BIRT with our web application? If we go ahead with
BIRT 2.0.1 to implement above-mentioned features, can we migrate to
BIRT 2.1 easily? Or does it involve total rewrite of our integration
code?
Thank You,
Prashanth.
