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. We're rolling on towards the end of the year. I've been unable to spend as much time in the forums lately, but many other community members are stepping up and answering questions, so keep the questions coming! 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 this week is about hierarchical/tree reports. The poster has a XML dataSource with an unknown depth of children. They want to be able to recursively check for children to create a hierarchical report. If anyone has any experience creating such a report with BIRT, please post your suggestions in this thread!

The next topic I'll cover this week is about using multi-select parameters. I'm sure this has been covered in here before, but since it's a frequent topic in the forums, it's probably worth covering again. When you use a multi-select parameter in BIRT, you're no longer able to link it to a dataSet parameter. You'll have to iterate through the parameter object and add your where statement in script. When you do this, you open your report to possible SQL injection if you don't validate the entries. One suggestion to avoid this is to download the BIRT Functions Lib from the BIRT Exchange marketplace and use the bind parameters method provided with the plugin.

The last topic for this week is about embedded element alignment. This is another problem that is seen a lot. Many times when someone is dealing with a complex layout, they start embedding grids within grids to achieve the desired layout. While this works, you'll end up with lots of alignment issues because of the default padding that each cell of the grid and the grid itself will have. To avoid the work it takes to get the alignment right and to just avoid the messy use of embedded grids, the best solution is to determine how many different rows and columns your grid would take up if the entire thing were split to have the smallest cells you're working with in any single embedded grid. Then, all you'll do is merge cells to get the layout you want. Doing it this way makes it so that you're only working with a single grid, which can make life easier on you when you're trying to line cells up.

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.