BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Michael's BIRT Blog

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. The forums are very busy, lately. Hopefully community contributions will continue to rise! As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered question, for this week, is about special characters, in BIRT. The poster is wanting to know if there is a list of characters that anyone has come up with that are special characters within BIRT. If anyone has come up with a list, like this, please post in the forum thread.

The next question, from last week, is about changing the selected column in a query based on a parameter. The poster wanted to have a query like, "select ? from table1", where '?' was controlled by a parameter that could be several different options. A solution is provided in the forum thread that uses a marker string in the query that is replaced in the beforeOpen script of the dataSet.

The last topic, for this week, is about setting colors in BIRT with the text color, i.e. "blue". The poster was attempting to set a color within their BIRT report. The color they were trying to set was "lightgray". This may be recognized by other programs, but not by BIRT, so this one doesn't work. If you look in the property editor at the colors in the drop down for setting the text or background colors, you'll see the list of text colors that BIRT recognizes. If you don't see it in there, you'll need to use the color code, instead. That was the solution, in this case.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. Like I figured, last week, the forum traffic has picked back up, in a big way, this week. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post, from last week, that I'll discuss is about adding a processing bar when generating a PDF report. The poster is wanting to know if there's a way in which they can add a "processing, please wait" bar to let the user know the PDF is still processing. If anyone has experience with this issue or has a suggestion to something that could work, please post in the forum thread!

The next post I'll cover, this week, is about putting the total on top of a stacked bar chart. The poster was wanting to find a way to show the total bar value in a label on the top of a stacked bar, rather than just the individual stacked bar values. An example report design is posted in the thread that shows how script can be used to achieve this, by hiding the label for the bottom series and changing the value of the top series's label to be the sum of the bar.

The last topic we'll cover, from last week, is about truncating a long URL, but keeping the hyperlink. The poster was wanting to know how they could truncate a long URL in their table, for clean design purposes, but still keep the value of the entire URL for the hyperlink. One way to do this is given in the forum thread. It is to use the following script:

var myaction = this.createAction();
myaction.setHyperlink(this.getValue(),"_blank");
this.action = myaction;
this.setDisplayValue(this.getValue().substr(0,20));

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. EclipseCon was good, last week. Lots of BIRT users in attendance. If you were there, hopefully you swung by and saw us. The forums were a little bit slow, last week, but I'm certain they'll pick right back up, this week. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic for this week is about passing a database connection to BIRT. The poster wants to be able to pass an existing database connection to BIRT so a new one doesn't have to be used. They show some code of how they're currently trying it. If anyone has done this and has suggestions, please post in the thread.

The next question, for this week, is about rotating a label text 90 degrees. The poster wanted to be able to rotate their header labels 90 degrees, so they could give a meaningful header to narrow columns. A solution of creating a rotated text report element is given as a solution. Another solution, if using XLS as your output, is built into the SpudSoft XLS emitter, which allows you to specify a rotation angle in a "UserProperty" and the emitter handles the rotation.

The last post I'll cover, from last week, is about aggregating across multiple tables. The poster wanted to be able to be able to add two totals, from two different tables together. The solution given was a devShare post that shows how to use global variables in script to store the values, so you can access them elsewhere in script to do your calculations. A link to the devShare post can be found in the forum thread.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. Forum traffic has been very high, as of late. EclipseCon is this week, so I'll be there, instead of in the forums. So, if you see a question you know the answer to, please feel free to provide your suggestions or solution. I'll be back, next week, though. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic for this week is about creating custom group intervals for crosstabs. The poster has groupings they'd like to create in their crosstab so they can do aggregations over these groups. However, their groups are non-linear ranges. If anyone has created custom grouping ranges for crosstabs and has a suggestion or solution, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover this week is about changing the title of the BIRT viewer. The poster wanted to change/remove the "BIRT Report Viewer" text from the title bar and page header. The solution to this is to simply use the __title URL parameter to assign a new value.

The last topic from last week is about changing colors by series in a chart. The poster wanted to know how they could specify a series to change the color of in their chart script. They knew how to change the color, just not how to do it only for a certain script. A simple snippet of code is included in the thread that should get this done.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. Traffic is slowing down a little bit, it seems, but the forums are still busy. They were just REALLY busy before! :) Many great questions and answers were posted. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post for this week is about dynamic ACL expressions. The poster is using Actuate BIRT and is trying to find a way to write a data row security expression that would cover all roles for a particular country to see the reports for their country. Currently, they specify "manager" and "staff" in the list, but they'd like to be able to do something like "*" + country in case any new roles are created. If anyone has experienced a similar situation and has suggestions, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover this week is about creating a row number in a crosstab. The solution to be able to add a row number to a crosstab is to simply add a grid to the outer dimension and use a dynamic textbox to increment a previously initialized variable. A more detailed explanation can be found in the thread.

The last topic for this week is about multi-select cascading parameters. When creating a cascading parameter, the multi-select option is only available on the final parameter of the group. However, the poster found a solution to allow them to be able to do so. A link to their devShare post that describes what they did can be found in the thread.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. The traffic in the forums continues to be very high. Many great questions and answers were posted. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered question for this week is about accessing a session variable from external application in BIRT report. The poster wants to be able to call their BIRT report in a JSP embedded viewer and pass a session variable into BIRT to be used in their where clause. If anyone has an example of this or a description of what needs to be done, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover from last week is about setting a page break in a crosstab using script. The poster wanted to be able to dynamically add a page break in script, based on a parameter selected by the user. Usually you can set the page break interval on a group in the onPrepare method of the crosstab. However, in this case, the dimensions are being edited dynamically in the beforeFactory, so this simple solution didn't work. An example report showing a way to do this is included in the thread.

The last post I'll cover this week is about displaying "no data" when your csv source file is blank. If you're using a csv file as your source and your csv file will always have the header info, this won't happen to you. However, if your csv file is completely empty when there is no data, then you'll get errors if a report element uses the dataSet that tries to access this file. The solution offered in the thread to get around this involves reading in the file in script prior to running the dataSet, so you can drop any elements that might use this data from the report. This avoids any errors. An example can be found in the thread.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. We're in the last month of the quarter, now, and the forums are as busy as ever. This could be a year for the record books! As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from this past week is about dynamically changing the height of an image elemnt. The poster wants to change the height/width of the images in their report based on the attribute in their XML dataSource. If anyone has a suggestion or solution for this. Please post in the thread.

The next post I'll cover for this week is about setting up a tooltip in a crosstab. The poster wanted to be able to add a tooltip to their crosstab, using java. A solution is provided that shows how this can be done by using HTML script tags in a text element.

The last topic I'll cover from last week is about sticking an element to the bottom of the last page. This is a highly requested feature that is not available, yet. A link to one of the possible workarounds is available in the thread. A link to an enhancement request is also in the thread if you'd like to "vote" for the enhancement.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. We continue to have great traffic in the forums as we get closer to the end of February. EclipseCon is next month, so I only see the forums getting busier as we head towards that. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from last week is about launching PERL script from BIRT. The poster wants to know if there's a way to launch some PERL script or an external app with a hyperlink, in BIRT. If anyone has any suggestions or solutions, please post in the thread.

The next post for this week is about creating a bursting report. The poster wanted to be able to run a detail report for every group returned in their main report. A couple links are shown in the thread that will help in this scenario. Another issue did come up when doing this in the BIRT iServer. It's not as easy to do when deployed to the iServer because of not being able to access the detail report by a file system location. If anyone has done something like this with the iServer, please post what you did to get it to work.

The last topic from last week is about dynamic y-axis label size. The poster was modifying the labels on the y-axis in script. This worked for them fine. The issue is, when they edit the label, if the space already provided is too small, the label value is cut off. an example is provided that shows how to use chart scripting to change the inset value for the label, so the entire text can be seen.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. The forum traffic has been pretty high, so far, this month. Let's keep it up. Many great questions and answers were posted. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from last week is about creating charts in java. The poster wants to be able to create pie and bar charts in code, instead of in the designer. If anyone has any examples they've done or links on where they can find examples, please post in the thread.

The next topic for this week is about determining if a parameter is multi-select or not. The poster wanted to be able to step through their parameters in their report and determine if the parameter was a multi-select or not, so they'd know whether they needed to step through the parameter object or not. A solution is provided that grabs all the parameters, determines if they're multi-select or not, then steps through the selected value or values, and then displays them in the report.

The last topic for this week is about hiding the legend from a secondary axis. The poster had two series in their chart that had the same groupings, so they wanted to be able to remove the second series groups from the legend. An example report is available in the thread that shows one way that this can be achieved using chart scripting.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. The forum traffic is starting to pick up again. Many great questions and answers were posted. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic for last week is about forcing a page break in a crosstab. The poster has a crosstab with several weeks of data. If they have 17 days in their range, they want to be able to show 3 crosstabs. The first two with 7 days each and the last with 3 days. If anyone has a good solution or suggestion for this, please post in the forum thread.

The next topic for this week is about converting dateTime fields to GMT. The poster wanted to be able to display their dateTime values in their report in GMT. The server is in CST. The easiest way, if the date just needs to be displayed this way is to use the .toGMTString() function. Another option could be to add or subtract hours from your date depending on the offset.

The last issue for this week is about invalid dates in the dataSet. The poster was having an issue when invalid dates are in their dataSet. For example, if a date is entered as 2/10/20122, on accident, the large year value would overflow the date field and would return them a large integer, rather than a date. This large integer is actually the number of days from the "zero" date in their system. So, the way to get this back to a date in BIRT is to take this number plus the number of days from the java default "zero" date to whatever your system's default date is, and use it in the new Date() function as the days parameter. This will recreate the incorrectly entered date so it can be displayed and the user can tell what happened, rather than just seeing a large integer.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.