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| <p class="head">BIRT Overview</p> |
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| <p class="subhead">Report Introduction</p> |
| |
| <h1>Introduction</h1> |
| |
| <p> |
| BIRT is an Eclipse-based open source reporting system for web applications, |
| especially those based on Java and J2EE. BIRT has two main components: a report |
| designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you can add to your |
| app server. |
| BIRT also offers a charting engine that lets you add charts to your own application. |
| <p> |
| The current released version is 2.0. We encourage you to download |
| BIRT, try it, and give us your feedback though the <a href="../community.html">newsgroups and Bugzilla</a>. |
| <p> |
| With BIRT, you can add a rich variety of reports to your application. |
| |
| <dl class="arrow-list"> |
| <dt>Lists |
| <dd>The simplest reports are lists of data. As the lists get longer, you can add |
| grouping to organize related data together (orders grouped by customer, products |
| grouped by supplier). If your data is numeric, you can easily add totals, averages |
| and other summaries. |
| |
| <dt>Charts |
| <dd>Numeric data is much easier to understand when presented as a chart. BIRT |
| provides pie charts, line & bar charts and many more. BIRT charts can be rendered in |
| SVG and support events to allow user interaction. |
| |
| <dt>Crosstabs |
| <dd>Crosstabs (also called a cross-tabulation or matrix) shows data in two |
| dimensions: sales per quarter or hits per web page. (Crosstabs are not yet |
| in Release 2.0, but are planned for a future release.) |
| |
| <dt>Letters & Documents |
| <dd>Notices, form letters, and other textual documents are easy to create with BIRT. |
| Documents can include text, formatting, lists, charts and more. |
| |
| <dt>Compound Reports |
| <dd>Many reports need to combine the above into a single document. For example, a |
| customer statement may list the information for the customer, provide text about |
| current promotions, and provide side-by-side lists of payments and charges. A |
| financial report may include disclaimers, charts, tables all with extensive formatting |
| that matches corporate color schemes. |
| </dl> |
| |
| <h1>The Anatomy of a Report</h1> |
| <p> |
| BIRT reports consist of four main parts: data, data transforms, |
| business logic and presentation. |
| |
| <dl class="arrow-list"> |
| <dt>Data |
| <dd>Databases, web services, Java objects all can supply data to your BIRT report. |
| Release 2.0.0 provides JDBC and XML support, as well as support for using code to get at |
| other sources of data. BIRT's Open Data Access (ODA) framework allows anyone to |
| build new UI and runtime support for any kind of tabular data. Further, a single |
| report can include data from any number of data sources. |
| |
| <dt>Data Transforms |
| <dd>Reports present data sorted, summarized, filtered and grouped to fit the user's |
| needs. While databases can do some of this work, BIRT must do it for "simple" data |
| sources such as flat files or Java objects. BIRT allows sophisticated operations |
| such as grouping on sums, percentages of overall totals and more. |
| |
| <dt>Business Logic |
| <dd>Real-world data is seldom structured exactly as you'd like for a report. |
| Many reports require business-specific logic to convert raw data into information |
| useful for the user. If the logic is just for the report, you can script it using |
| BIRT's JavaScript support. If your application already contains the logic, you can |
| call into your existing Java code. |
| |
| <dt>Presentation |
| <dd>Once the data is ready, you have a wide range of options for presenting it to |
| the user. Tables, charts, text and more. A single data set can appear in multiple |
| ways, and a single report can present data from multiple data sets. |
| </dl> |
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