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

Last Week in the Forums - 9/3/12

The first post, for this week, is about highlighting bars in a single series of a chart, only. The poster was using script in the beforeDrawDataPoint to color their data point. The problem is that they were highlighting all series, not just the one they wanted. The solution to this is to check the series with dph.getSeriesDisplayValue() before setting the color.

The next post, for this week, is about reordering columns in a table. The poster has a table already in their design, but they'd like to reorder the columns based on a condition. An example is provided in the forum thread with beforeFactory code that switches the order of columns in a table based on a parameter.

Here are a few more :

• Alternating row background color in Crosstab
  
• Using numeric values from a data set in a global Variable
  
• How to Sort a chart on Dates
  
• Integrating Maximo reports into Birt Viewer

Here are a few unanswered posts, from last week:

• How to create Report using Rest web Service
  
• Changes in Data Objects not showing on reports

If you have a suggestion or solution for any of these, please post in the thread!

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. It's nearly the end of 2011 and the forums are still quite active, both with questions and community member answers! Let's finish this year off strong and keep pushing next year to maintain the BIRT Exchange community as the strongest BIRT community out 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 unanswered post for the week is about barcodes not displaying in BIRT viewer. The poster is using Maximo and is able to see the barcodes in PDF, but not when they use the BIRT viewer output. If anyone has experience with this issue, please post your suggestions and/or solution in the forum thread!

The next topic from last week is hiding a series in a chart when there is no data. The poster wanted to be able to hide a chart series when it contained no data. A link was provided that shows hiding a series. The next question was how to figure out when a series had no data. The solution given for this was to use the AfterDataSetFilled function in the chart script to figure this out. The poster did this and posted the code that worked for them in the forum thread! Check it out!

The last topic I'll cover this week is how to format a crosstab so that a border separates the weeks. The poster had a report with a crosstab with a dimension for "day of month". They wanted to be able to separate the weeks with a border line. An example is provided in the thread that shows the script necessary to add a border in the necessary locations to achieve the desired look.

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.