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 stayed pretty busy this last week. Maybe down a little from previous weeks, but busy nonetheless. Many great questions and answers are being posted every day. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

As I've been doing the last couple weeks, the first post will be one from last week that doesn't have a response yet. This one is about the .rptdocument size. They have a client who is wanting to save the .rptdocuments on their server, but the .rptdocuments take up lots of memory, so they're wanting to know if there is a way to reduce the size of the .rptdocument files. So, if you have a solution for this, or if you have a method you've used to deal with the large size of these files, please feel free to comment on the post!

The next post for this week is about white spacing around embedded grids that mess up alignment. The poster was having an issue with extra white space causing alignment issues when they embed grids inside other elements. If they embed several grids within others, the spacing becomes very bad. The solution to this is that each element has a 1pt default padding. If you go to the padding settings in the property editor and make these 0, this alignment issue will go away. You won't see this change in your design, but if you run the report, you'll notice the difference.

The last topic for this week is about creating a TOC with page numbers and bookmark hyperlinks in your report. This has been a very frequent topic for the forums, so I thought I'd cover it in here. I may have done so before, but it never hurts to do it again! :) To get a TOC with page numbers to work, you'll need to use separate run and render tasks. From the designer, this means you'll need to use the web viewer and then export to your desired output from there. When deployed, you'll either use java to call the tasks separately, or you'll use the frameset url. In your design, you'll need to put a table or list at the top of your report with distinct listings of whatever your groups are, for your TOC. In your table with your data, you'll need to store the current "pageNumber" into a persistent global variable that is named for your group. This will be done in the onCreate for your group header. Now, in the onRender of a dynamic text box in your TOC table, you can recall these PGV's you set in the onCreate to display the page numbers. For the bookmarks, you just create a bookmark in the data table on the group header and then use the internal bookmark hyperlink on the TOC table to jump to the bookmark. I was unable to attach the example in the forums for some reason, but it attached in here. So, if you need an example, look at the attachments.

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.