BIRT-ing Out Loud

The BIRT Mobile Viewer is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch (Download from iTunes). This viewer empowers users to take the power of BIRT content with them wherever they go. Any BIRT-based content; anywhere you are. Powered by the Actuate iServer, your BIRT content is presented with speed and fidelity.

The BIRT Mobile Client is a native application built from the ground-up to meet the highest standards for an iPhone-based experience. This is not another browser-based tool styled to look like an iPhone application. Built in Objective C, this application tightly integrates with the core OS. Want to initiate a phone call or an e-mail from within a BIRT report? No Problem. Want to show off your BIRT content with the best perspective? The viewer is orientation aware; the application will automatically rotate to show the content in its best light. Want to easily refresh the content list on the home page? Simply shake the device. All of this is possible through the development of a native application.

When you install the app, you will get to experiment with a set of sample content. All content built in and powered by BIRT. Search Twitter; check out the hot trends on Amazon; check out the BIRT Mobile News. All of this BIRT content is interesting, even fun, but it is only the beginning. The Mobile Client is already completely integrated to the BIRT onDemand experience. Upload a BIRT design or document to your onDemand account and quickly add it to your mobile client via the document’s context menu. Already have an iServer or iServer Express? You can deploy the Actuate Mobile Framework yourself and mobilize ANY BIRT content.

Your most important asset: Information. Why not take it with you wherever you are? Grab the power of BIRT and get going! This FREE application functions on both iPhone and iPod Touch models running at least version 3.0 of the iPhone OS. Download and install it today.

It is time to select the community favorite for February’s best DevShare contribution. This month’s eligible contest candidates are:

1. DashBIRT 1.0 - Designing BIRT Reports, by cypherdj
2. Designing a Master/Detail Report with BIRT - Designing BIRT Reports, by AndrewSYIQ

Contest voting is open to the entire BIRT Exchange community. If you haven’t done so already, please take a look at these submissions and vote here. Your vote is important and helps show community support for our valued DevShare contributors.

Note that you must be logged in to vote. The poll closes at 2:30pm Pacific time on March 16, 2010. Contest rules can  be found on the DevShare Contributor of the Month Wiki page.

For those of you that have been trying to integrate BIRT into JavaServer Faces (JSF) applications, the jsf4birt component library should make things easier. This library was created by Exadel and supports the rendering of BIRT-based reports on pages wthin JSF web applications.

There are two components; a birtWrapper, and actuateWrapper. 

• The birtWrapper component displays BIRT reports created in the Eclipse BIRT Report Designer. This component uses the BIRT runtime API and calls the appropriate part of the API to get generated HTML code to put on the page. Everything is done on the server side following the usual JSF lifecycle processing.
• The actuateWrapper component loads reports from an installed Actuate server. The component uses the Actuate JavaScript API to load and run BIRT reports and allows the integration of the AJAX-based BIRT Interactive Viewer.

Max Katz and I demonstrated the jsf4birt component library in an online webinar.  Watch the webinar recording here

Instructions for installing and testing the jsf4birt component can be found here

I had a great time at CeBIT (although it was very busy, we barely had time to breath). We had a great BIRT event on Thursday where more than 20 people showed up and I was really impressed on how the German audience was really BIRT savvy.

This was the first time Eclipse was at CeBIT and our booth was really busy. Actually the whole open source hall was almost overrun with people.

Of course many of the people were most impressed by out BIRT Rocks! T-Shirts (see my previous post http://www.birt-exchange.org/blog/2010-03-04/birt-rocks-cebit/).

Say you want to create a crosstab showing payments or orders by year for each customer. That is easy enough. You create a dataCube with Customer and year as groups/dimensions and their payment/order totals as you measure. In your dataSet, you also have a credit limit for each customer.  You would like to sort by this so that your “typically” bigger customers are at the top of your list.

If you went to the sorting tab in the property editor for the crosstab with things setup as described above, you wouldn’t find the option to sort by credit limit available because you aren’t displaying it in your crosstab. You don’t want to put this value in your crosstab though, so you’re stuck, right? Wrong. There is a feature in BIRT that is somewhat hidden if you don’t know the right place to look that will solve this.

If you open your dataCube and double click on the group/dimension that you’d like to sort, a group level editor will pop up:

As you can see in the above image, there is an attribute section for the grouping.  If you click where it says “Create New Attribute”, you can select your credit limit field and it will then be listed under the attributes section as you can see done above.  Now when you go to your sorting tab for your crosstab and click on “Add” and select the group you added the attribute to, if you click on the function button next to sort key, you’ll be able to see and select the attribute as your sort key.

The new sort key will be in the form of dimension[”groupName”][”dimensionName”][”attributeName”].  The resulting crosstab will now not be sorted alphabetically by customername or by the summary field, it’ll be sorted by the credit limit value from your dataSet.  The following link is to a devShare entry on this with this example included.

 http://www.birt-exchange.org/devshare/designing-birt-reports/1172-sorting-a-crosstab-by-a-field-not-in-the-crosstab/#description

One of the nice benefits of the BIRT Exchange Marketplace is that it is a great showcase for some really cool things you can do with BIRT. The BIRT Mashboard is an excellent example of how BIRT can be leveraged in rich information applications to create world class solutions. This fully featured app is designed for managers who need to make decisions based on varied cuts of business data. Specifically, the BIRT Mashboard allows executives to create their own custom dashboards and data visualizations with interactive drill-down capabilities.

The BIRT Mashboard starts with a blank canvas that can be populated with pre-defined controls called portlets to construct a page of interactive BIRT charts, tables, graphs and other data elements that describe your (and others’) data. No programming knowledge is required to make the page – just drag and drop portlets from a palette to the canvas and it just works. Once these portlets are placed on the canvas, they adapt dynamically to each other based on the user’s actions.

As an example, let’s say that three portlets exist on your canvas, the first is a pie chart that divides your company’s total sales by region, the second is a table that lists total sales by product line and a third is a map that marks each of your sales offices worldwide. Since the portlets communicate, you can click on one of the regions in the pie chart and the table next to it changes from showing a global representation of product line sales to just the data for that region. The map also shifts from a world view to show a regional view – plus, in this example, adds pins for each customer located there. Clicking on one of those pins then pops up a list of your products purchased by that customer as well as a contact name and phone number.

The BIRT Mashboard comes with some predefined portlets and more can be created by developers and analysts. These portlets are able to pull data from many different sources (internal and external) and inter-portlet communication is managed by simple javascripting. Once created, these portlets can be reused across many custom dashboards and reports, and security and scalability is ensured by Actuate’s backend iServer technology.

Note that you can present content built in BIRT and served by the iServer right alongside any other web accessible content too. The BIRT Mashboard allows you full control of your own application experience. Whether that content is built inside BIRT or not, the BIRT Mashboard brings it all together in a cohesive easy-to-use interface.

I encourage you to take a look at the Overview video (under the BIRT Mashboard demo tab) and then download the app and try it out. You can find 6 separate ten minute how-to videos (also under the demo tab) to help you get started.

Don’t have an iServer? No problem, you can get a free trial version of iServer Express from BIRT Exchange or even better, choose the 1 Click Install option for BIRT Mashboard and open a free account on the new BIRT onDemand service which will set up and pre-configure everything you need at no cost to evaluate the BIRT Mashboard on our servers.

And please don’t forget to let us know what you think of the BIRT Mashboard or any other apps you evaluate on the BIRT Exchange Marketplace by adding your comments under their corresponding review tabs.

The most popular T-Shirt @ CeBIT

Our BIRT Workshop is getting some press:

http://www.hannover-zeitung.net/messe-hannover/54-messe-hannover/134307-cebit-2010-actuate-veranstaltet-birt-workshop

It’s still not too late to submit your proposal to the contest…

What can you do to show how well BIRT and Adobe technologies complement each other? Make your proposal by March 10th and if selected, you have until May 19th to complete an implementation and submit it to the BIRT Exchange Marketplace for a share in the $5,000 prize pool. All we need at this stage is just the proposal (no code) that describes your idea.

To Get Started

Take a look at Dan Melcher’s blog and review the FAQ and Rules for contest eligibility and requirements.a

If you are an Adobe technology developer who is not familiar with BIRT, please check out:
http://www.actuate.com/be/news-events/resources/?articleid=19113

If you’re a BIRT developer who needs some help getting started with Adobe technologies, please see:
http://www.actuate.com/be/news-events/resources/?articleid=19114

Once familiar with the contest, sit back and let your creativity soar. What can you or your team do to showcase these two great technologies?

How to Enter

When you’ve come up with a good idea, write it up and submit your proposal as an e-mail message or attachment to contests@birt-exchange.com.

Each proposal should contain all the following info:

1. For each team member, indicate Name, Address, E-mail Address.
2. For each team member, please state technical experience or qualifications.
3. Describe what your software will do.
4. Which Adobe and BIRT technologies will be integrated. For BIRT technology, please be sure to specify whether Eclipse or Actuate (commercial) BIRT technology will be used.
5. What platforms and environments will be supported or required by your software?
6. Which BIRT and Adobe features/interfaces and functionality will be used?
7. What benefits will your software provide to developers and/or application users?
8. Please specify in detail what tasks your software will perform when it’s complete. These are the “completeness criteria” which will be used to evaluate whether your finished software achieves its intended goal.

Note that full descriptions of the proposal requirements are listed in the Contest Rules. Please refer to section 3 (How To Enter) of these rules before completing the information above.

If you have any questions or concerns, please send e-mail to contests@birt-exchange.com.

We look forward to seeing some awesome proposals!

The RCL Master Dashboards are a collection of four BIRT templates that allow you to quickly create dashboard content to Track, Compare, Target and Measure. Since they are solutions built upon the Reusable Component Library v2.0.3 and BIRT best practices, you only have to point your data to them, and you’re done.

I think using the RCL Master Dashboards is going to save you a ton of development and testing time. It’s fun just to fold your data into them, and see the dashboard visualizations instantly populate with your data.

Both the RCL Master Dashboards and Reusable Component Library v2.0.3 can be found on the BIRT Exchange Marketplace.