Output directly to Excel

[cmrdjr]

I have a report that is bringing back so much data that the BIRT viewer is timing out upon rendering. The user would like the data to go directly to Excel instead of the user trying to bring it back in the viewer to imediately do an Export.

Is there a way to tell the BIRT report to open directly into Excel?

Thanks for any help.

[cmrdjr]

Any ideas on this issue?

[bhanley]

If you are using iServer or iServer Express you can schedule the report to execute and specify the output format as a part of the job. If you are using some other means of rendering the report, you should be able to programatically set the desired format.

More importantly is the time-out issue which is not desirable. Is there a way to better design the report or data source to avoid this? Off-loading work onto the database tier or building a more restrictive query could help.

Can you supply some more details? How are you exposing report/content to you users? How flexible is the data set you have created?

[cmrdjr]

All I know is that we are using the BIRT viewer to render the results. It resides on a server of which I'm not involved. I would love to programatically set the results to always return in Excel, but could not find any option like that in the Report Design in BIRT. I was hoping I just missed the option and someone could tell me where to set that option.

The query actually finishes very quickly - within seconds due to indexes, but returns a massive amount of data (General ledger data for a whole year -- 100,000 rows or more) that times out the browser during rendering. Due to the end user wanting to see that amount of data I cannot reduce the result set.

[bhanley]

You cannot dictate an ouptut format in the design. This is the intended functionality as the design is supposed to support all output formats. It si the rendering engine that chooses the format at request time.

I would talk to the folks that manage your report server and see what you can do to modify the request.