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 continue to pick the pace back up and are pretty busy, now. Keep the good questions and answers coming. 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 cover, is about outputting the display name in csv export. The issue in this post is that the csv export uses the original column name from the database, rather than the "display name", defined in the report. The output is fine when export report is used, but with export data, it is not. If anyone has a solution or suggestion for this, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover, this week, is about sorting a string field in a custom order. The issue in this post is that the desired sort order for a "status" column should be user defined. The sort order should be able to be any order, not just ascending and descending alphabetically. An example solution is provided that takes the values from the field and puts them in an HTML form with input text boxes, so the user can specify the order. A link to the devshare article can be found in the thread or you can just click here, to go directly to it.

The last topic, for this week, is about hiding the date that always shows at the bottom of the report. I saw this question, last week, and it made me think. If you're new to BIRT, you may not know the whole master page vs design layout setup, so I could see how this could trick a new user. For those wanting to get rid of the date at the bottom of the page, simply go to the master page tab under the design window, and delete the date element from the footer. This is also where you would add any content that you'd like to appear on each page, like page numbers, etc.

Thanks for reading this weeks blog! 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 are in the last month of the year now and the forums continue to be a busy place. I'm not expecting this to change in the new year, either. BIRT is obviously a very popular data visualization tool! :) 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!

This weeks unanswered question is about scheduling reports to output in CSV. The poster is wanting to be able to schedule reports to run to CSV output. They are using Maximo where they have the option to schedule for PDF and XLS, but not CSV. If anyone has a suggestion or solution, please respond in the thread that is linked above!

The second topic for this week is about elapsed time formatting. The poster had a field that represented the seconds between two dates. They wanted to show the time in a format like, hh:mm:ss. They created a datetime field and used the seconds to create a date and formatted the date to only showed the time portion. This worked out great, until they had a span of over 24 hours, then the elapsed day, disappeared. The way suggested to handle this is to write a simple script to figure the hours, minutes, and seconds and just create the formatted time string that way. If any aggregations must be done on this data, you still have the elapsed seconds field to use in these computations.

The last topic for this week is about showing a table tooltip on a chart on mouseover. The poster wanted to be able to show a 4x4 grid of detail values when they hover over a data point in a chart but didn't know how. In the thread, an example shows how you can create a HTML table in a div in a HTML text box, then use client side script to cause a HTML table to "popup" when you hover over a datapoint. 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.