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 very busy, lately. Hopefully community contributions will continue to rise! As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered question, for this week, is about special characters, in BIRT. The poster is wanting to know if there is a list of characters that anyone has come up with that are special characters within BIRT. If anyone has come up with a list, like this, please post in the forum thread.

The next question, from last week, is about changing the selected column in a query based on a parameter. The poster wanted to have a query like, "select ? from table1", where '?' was controlled by a parameter that could be several different options. A solution is provided in the forum thread that uses a marker string in the query that is replaced in the beforeOpen script of the dataSet.

The last topic, for this week, is about setting colors in BIRT with the text color, i.e. "blue". The poster was attempting to set a color within their BIRT report. The color they were trying to set was "lightgray". This may be recognized by other programs, but not by BIRT, so this one doesn't work. If you look in the property editor at the colors in the drop down for setting the text or background colors, you'll see the list of text colors that BIRT recognizes. If you don't see it in there, you'll need to use the color code, instead. That was the solution, in this case.

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.