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

As the business world changes with time, so does your data source's schema, i.e. changing table names, removing columns, changing data types, etc. In doing so, IT must spend lots of valuable resources updating applications that are impacted by these changes.


To help soften the blow, Actuate 11SP4 introduces new Impact and Dependency Analysis capabilities. This allows the developer to identify what applications and content must be updated with the change to the database schema, giving a much clearer picture on the cost and resources needed to complete the update, before it even begins. Additionally, such analysis allows the development team to easily identify which BIRT designs depend upon certain libraries, Information Objects, or Data Object, to easily assess the impact of updating or removing these resources.

The Database Search also allows BIRT developers to easily identify files that use and are dependent on the selected database component. With a couple clicks of the mouse, a BIRT developer can access a diagram, showing the dependency tree, for the project. The diagram also highlights the dependency path from the selected BIRT item, to all other items that would be affected by a change to this element.

The dependency Impact Analysis view can also be invoked by clicking on any file in the Outline view of the BIRT designer, such as a BIRT design, a Data Object, an Information Object, BIRT Library, etc. This gives the developer another way to access the dependency analysis information for a given file, before making any changes.



Another new feature, in Actuate 11SP4, is the ability to create and preview Information Objects within BIRT Designer Pro, rather than having to deploy them to a BIRT iServer as part of the authoring process. BIRT developers will still have the familiar experience they're used to, when creating the Information Object, they just no longer have to specify an iServer, though, Information Objects published to an iServer will still be available when creating designs, just like in the past. Also, to make things easier on the developer, report designs and Information Objects no longer have to be created in separate projects, allowing the BIRT developer to create Information Objects and the designs that consume them, at the same time, as part of the same project.

Publishing to your BIRT iServer, in Actuate 11SP4, has also been made easier, providing a single BIRT Designer Pro dialog for publishing your designs and resources. The dialog allows BIRT developers to choose the files they'd like to publish and also choose whether or not they should overwrite the previous version, if it exists, already, on the server. Publishing to the iServer isn't the only thing that's gotten simpler. BIRT Designer Pro also provides a new download dialog to download published or user created content, for re-use or enhancement.



Next time, I'll show how Actuate 11SP4 enhances the usability of the BIRT product line. In the meantime, download a free trial version of Actuate BIRT iServer and BIRT Designer Pro, to check it out for yourself.

Actuate 11SP4 builds on the already powerful ActuateOne™ platform, by bringing many, new capabilities, to the table, like developer productivity, visualization and interactivity, end user usability, and more. These capabilities include:

• HTML5 charts to enable consistent user experience and enhanced interactivity across conventional and mobile platforms
• New data source types, such as, Hadoop and Salesforce.com
• Impact and dependency analysis to ease develpment and management of applications
• Simplified publishing to the BIRT iServer
• Performance Optimization in BIRT Studio and Information Objects
• Relative time period support, enabling more powerful and dynamic comparisons across time
• and more...

One of the more major enhancements, of the bunch, is that all commonly used BIRT chart types now support HTML5 output format, along with the existing formats, SVG, JPG, PNG, and BMP. Catching your user's attention will be easier than ever with the out-of-the-box animation effects and new levels of interactivity. Custom animation effects and interactivity can also be defined, through scripting, making being forced to rely on pre-determined visualizations, a thing of the past.


Adding an HTML5 chart to your report is easy. Simply drag a chart from the palette, into your report layout, as you've always done. Only, choose HTML5 from the dropdown, instead of one of the other supported formats. Upgrading charts to HTML5, from one of the existing formats can be done by changing this same setting.



Making this change exposes the HTML5 chart specific properties, allowing you to preview the chart animation effects in the preview window of the chart builder. A script tab is now present in the chart builder, where custom animations, for HTML5 charts, are scripted. This script tab is also available with the other formats, for convenience of seeing everything in one place. Starting in 11SP4, theme functionality is available for all chart-specific formatting properties, like legend formatting, chart title formatting, etc. These themes can be used across all charts to give a common look/feel to your BIRT visualizations. The themes can also be exported to a library for reusability.


Next time, I'll detail how developer productivity will get a boost with Actuate 11SP4. In the meantime, download a free trial version of Actuate BIRT iServer and BIRT Designer Pro, to check it out for yourself.

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 staying steadily busy as we push into quarter number 4. I'll be gone most of this coming week at JavaOne, so I'll be scarce in the forums. If anyone has time to step in and answer some questions, that would be helpful! :) 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!

The first topic I'll cover from the past week's posts is how to use the same masterpage across multiple reports. In many instances, your reports you make will all have the same page size and page header and footer information. Rather than making the same masterpage over and over again, BIRT allows you to store a masterpage in a report library. You can then attach this library to all of your reports and use the masterpage. If you need to make changes in the masterpage for all of your reports, you don't need to change each individually. A change to the masterpage in your library will be inherited by all reports that use this library masterpage. Another option suggested in the thread would be to create a template that has this masterpage linked in it so that the report developer has this masterpage from the start.

The second topic we'll cover this week is preventing your SQL from running when you don't display your subreport. If you have a parameter that decides whether you want to show detail information that is in a subreport, you don't have to just hide the table. If you know you want to hide a table by a parameter, you can simply drop the table from the design in your beforeFactory method and the database will not be accessed. The code to do this is shown in the forum thread.

The last topic for this week is changing the title of the report viewer. If you're looking to change the title of the BIRT viewer, you can simply use the url parameter __title to set whatever value you'd like. If you'd like another option, you can go into the viewer's FramesetFragment.jsp page and change the title value there.

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.