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 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.