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 halfway through the year, already. The forums are still steadily busy and I look for that to continue. It seems like yesterday we were kicking off the new year. We've had a good first half, let's make the second half just as good or even better. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered question from last week is about passing connection credentials through XML. The poster is using an XML dataSource. They want to know if there is a way to pass the database connection credentials through XML. If anyone has experience with this issue or suggestions, please post in the thread.

The next topic for this week is about dynamic column sorting. The poster wanted to know how they could sort their report by clicking on a hyperlink in the column header. An example is posted in the thread which shows how this can be done using parameters, hyperlinks, and some script. The Actuate Interactive Viewer would be a way to handle this for all reports without the need to code each report.

The last topic I'll discuss is the newspaper layout issue. The poster was wanting to know if and when the newspaper layout would be supported as a standard feature. The answer is that there is no specific version set, yet. A post to a devShare example showing a way to create a newspaper layout can be found in the thread. The following link is the bug report / enhancement request for the newspaper layout. If you're wanting this feature, please click on the following link and let them know by voting for it.

https://bugs.eclipse...g.cgi?id=133218

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. The forums were down in traffic a little bit this past week, it seemed. Steady, but still a little slower than this year has been. Maybe people were taking last minute vacations before the weather gets too cold! :) 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 topic without a response, so far, for this week is about using a relative path for a .properties file. The poster wants to know if there's a way to call a .properties file with a relative path rather than with an absolute path. If you have an answer or suggestion, feel free to post it!

The second topic I'll discuss from last week is about dynamic chart titles. The poster was having the issue that when they disabled the grouping in their report, their chart reflected this correctly except in the title, it displayed a 'null' value. If they didn't disable the grouping, the title displayed correctly. The solution provided was to use a script expression to define the title of the chart that checks for null values. In this case, you'd display a default chart title. The script that the poster ended up using is available in the thread.

The third question I'll cover this week is about where to find downloads for previous BIRT versions. The question asked was where you can find older versions of BIRT. This question gets asked quite regularly. While we recommend that the newest version be used, sometimes, you're tied to an older version because of another software you're using. Even in this instance, you could deploy the newest version separately and make calls to it from your application, but if this is not an option, the downloads for older version of BIRT are available in an archive on the Eclipse.org website. The link can be found in the forum thread.

For the last question, I'm going to cover an extra post, from last week, that doesn't have an answer, yet. I thought I'd include this question as well because it seems like something that many people might work with and might have a workaround for. This question is about using a secure URL to connect to an XML data source. The poster is looking for a way to do this. They found a post in 2008 that showed this was a limitation of the current XML dataSource. If anyone has a workaround to accomplish this or if there is now a solution for this, please post your suggestions 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.