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 remain extremely busy. I'm finding less time to step into the forums, so there are many opportunities to contribute back to the community sitting there! 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 for this week is exploding the largest slice of a pie chart. When you create a pie chart, there are options to explode the slices of a pie chart, but there is not an option to explode only the largest slice. To do this, you'll need to use script to grab the largest slice value and then use the expression builder in the chart editor, for what value to explode, to grab the variable you set so that the largest slice is the only one that separates from the pie. An example is included in the forum thread.

The second topic I'll discuss is the script tag issue with BIRT and Firefox 5+. It seems that there is a bug with HTML script tags and Firefox when using BIRT. When using client side scripting in an HTML text box in your BIRT report, the script tag seems to be ignored in Firefox 5 and 6. I have checked this up to BIRT 3.7.1 with the same issue. They do still work with IE, so I'm not sure if this is a BIRT change issue or a change in how FF looks at script tags that hasn't been addressed in BIRT yet. A bug has been raised on this. You can view it in the forum thread.

The last topic for this week is how to grab data from your dataSet and store it in a variable for use elsewhere in your report. The poster wanted to be able to grab the value from all lines of their dataSet and store them all in their own individual variables to manipulate within their report. The solution given was to store the values in persistent global variables in the dataSet's onFetch method. With this approach, you can name each variable uniquely according to another value in the row or with a standard base name and an incrementing value concatenated to the end of this base value to make the name. Another possible way would be to create an array and store the values in it. Then, you'd have an array of values you could step through anywhere in your report to manipulate and do what you want.

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.