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

Last Week in the Forums - 9/24/12

The first post, for this week, is about placing a marker in the middle of a gantt series bar. The poster wanted to be able to have a marker in the middle of a gantt chart bar, that was not at the beginning or the end. A gantt chart only has the option to have a marker at the beginning or end of a series. An example is provided that shows how two series can be used to make it appear as if there is a marker in the middle of the bar.

The next post, for this week, is about getting multi-level numbering in html lists. The poster wanted to be able to take an HTML list like:

<ul class="numericbullets"> 
<li>Cats</li> 
<li>Dogs 
    <ul> 
        <li>Birds</li> 
        <li>Rats
                                <ul> 
                                                <li>Birds</li> 
                                                <li>Rats</li> 
                                                <li>Rats</li> 
                                                <li>Rats</li> 
                                </ul> 
                
                </li> 
    </ul> 
</li> 
<li>Rabbits</li> 
<li>Ants 
    <ul> 
        <li>Lions</li> 
        <li>Rats</li> 
        <li>Rats</li> 
        <li>Rats</li> 
    </ul> 
</li> 
<li>Ducks</li> 
</ul>

and make it look like:

    1. Cats
    2. Dogs
        2.1 Birds
        2.2 Rats
            2.2.1 Birds
            2.2.2 Rats
            2.2.3 Rats
            2.3.4 Rats
    3. Rabbits
    4. Ants
        4.1 Lions
        4.2 Rats
        4.3 Rats
        4.4 Rats
    5. Ducks

The needed CSS styles to make this happen were failing to upload into the design. The solution that was found to work was to take the css styles:

ul.numericbullets { counter-reset:section; list-style-type:none; } 
ul.numericbullets li { list-style-type:none; } 
ul.numericbullets li ul { counter-reset:subsection; } 
ul.numericbullets li ul li ul{ counter-reset:subsubsection; } 
ul.numericbullets li:before{ 
    counter-increment:section; 
    content:counter(section) ". ";
} 
ul.numericbullets li ul li:before { 
    counter-increment:subsection; 
    content:counter(section) "." counter(subsection) " "; 
} 
ul.numericbullets li ul li ul li:before { 
    counter-increment:subsubsection; 
    content:counter(section) "." counter(subsection) "." counter(subsubsection) " "; 
}

and place them in style.css in webcontet -> birt -> styles. This style sheet is used in run and frameset. It won't work with preview, so don't be worried if you don't see this in any output that uses the preview option.

Here are a few more :

• Invalid Design file
  
• dataset parameters disappear
  
• Create Global Function
  
• Calculate between rows
  
• Named parameters in DataSet Query

Here are a few unanswered posts, from last week:

• How to connecting to database during param validation
  
• Cross Tab -data not to sort alphabetically
  
• Can I flip the origin of bar chart?
  
• Flat file on iServer
  
• Exporting report with 'https' images

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. The forums picked back up after their one week lull. Keep the good questions and answers coming. 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 an issue opening a report from iServer. Normally, when they click on a report from the iServer, the parameter window pops up, then the report opens in that window. However, sporadically, the report opens in a new window and a new parameter window pops up over it. If the window is closed, the report is there. If anyone has experienced this issue, before, and knows what is happening, please post in the thread!

The next post I'll discuss, this week, is about adding another column to the grand total area in a crosstab. The poster wanted to add a second column to the grand total column to show a percentage of the total. An example is posted in the thread that shows a way in which this can be achieved.

The last post we'll cover, this week, is about creating a TOC in your report. The poster wanted to have a TOC in their report. A devShare example is linked in the thread that shows how a page number TOC and a hyperlink to the internal bookmark, in the report.

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 continue to be busy as we push through the last month of the first half of the year. I'm getting closer and closer to catching up on posts I've been working on. Thanks everyone, for your patience. :) As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from last week is about scripting in crosstabs. The poster has some script to set the format, depending on the value of a field in the crosstab. That is working fine for them. They also have some script where they're checking the value of another field and want to set the colors for the cell. This is not working for them. For more specifics, check out the thread. If you have suggestions or solutions, please post them.

The next topic for this week is about showing different content on the masterpage for different pages of the report. The poster wanted a grid on the first page and a different grid on the second page for printing customer invoices. An example report is provided in the thread that shows a way to achieve this. For it to work, the report must be ran using separate run and render tasks. See the thread for more information on this.

The last topic for this week is about setting the vertical position of a table footer. The poster wanted to know if they could determine the vertical position of the footer so they could push it to the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, I don't know that there's a way to do this, currently. The masterpage footer can be used with page or report variables to put page/report information. Another couple ways would be to add extra footer rows to your table and show/hide them, depending on your count of rows on the page or to use a HTML text box to force the footer down, also depending on your count of rows. Here are a couple devShare posts, showing the last two:

http://www.birt-exch...ting-row-color/

http://www.birt-exch...le-to-fit-page/

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. I'm doing my best to catch up the unanswered posts and the posts I'm working on. I was out a couple days and had the newsletter to get out, so if you know the answer to a post that you see isn't answered, feel free to post. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic, from last week, is about connection profiles. The poster wants to be able to create an editable connection profile for the purpose of editing the parameters for the dataSource for use in many reports. If anyone has experience editing connection profiles in this way, please post your suggestions in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover is about dynamic x-axis chart markers. The poster wanted to be able to create a dynamic marker on their dateTime type x-axis. A couple of examples are in the thread. One shows how to do this with a true dateTime axis and one shows how to do this with a dateTime category axis.

The last topic, for this week, is about getting a border only on the bottom of a group, in a crosstab. The poster wanted to be able to have a border on the bottom of each row grouping, in their crosstab. This would be easy, if they wanted a border on all rows, but with the way a crosstab is formed, it gets harder to put borders on only certain cells. An example is included in the thread that shows how this can be done in script.

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 June! Summer is upon us. I fully expect the forums to begin to slow down, sometime this month, as summer is here and there are vacations to be taken. As always, thanks to those users who help answer forum questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post for this week is about integrating BIRT reports in Vaadin portlet. The poster is wanting to be able to integrate birt reports into their Vaadin portlet. They are new to Vaadin and they can't figure it out. If anyone has done this or has suggestions, please post in the thread!

The next topic, from last week, that I'll cover, is about having a string field as a crosstab measure. The default aggregation performed on a crosstab element is SUM. If you've tried using a string and didn't know where to change this or have ever tried to sum with a string field, before, you know you end up with an error. When you want to use a string, the other thing you need to do is to change the aggregation to FIRST. To do this, double click on the measure in the crosstab wizard and change SUM to FIRST in the drop down. There is an example in the thread that shows this.

The last question, for this week, is about changing the colors of the series in a chart and setting the legend color to match. This is a very common question. I may have covered this in a past edition of LWITF, but it's worth covering again. In the forum thread, you'll see script that can be added to the chart script to change both the series color and the legend block color, to match, based on the series.

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 continue to be busy. There's also lots of community support right now, which is great. As always, a big thanks goes out to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from last week is about passing a date parameter to the report through a batch file. The poster is having a problem passing a time stamp through from the command line to their report. They get an error when giving the time stamp as the parameter in the batch file. If they set the default value in the report, it works, but they need to pass it in dynamically. If anyone has experience with this or any suggestions, please post them in the thread.

The next post I'll cover is about setting the DateTime axis min/max dynamically. The poster was trying to set the dateTime scale in a gantt chart because the chart was showing one time unit earlier, so there was a blank area to begin the chart. They didn't want this. They wanted the chart to begin with the first data point. The following script can be used to set the chart axis min value to the actual minimum value in the chart, so there is no space.

importPackage( Packages.org.eclipse.birt.chart.model.type.impl );
importPackage( Packages.org.eclipse.birt.chart.util);
importPackage(Packages.org.eclipse.birt.chart.model.data.impl);

function afterDataSetFilled(series, dataSet, icsc)
{
ps = PluginSettings.instance( );

dsp = ps.getDataSetProcessor( series.getClass() );
//find min date
if (series.getSeriesIdentifier() == "Series 1"){
        mmin = dsp.getMinimum( dataSet );       
        mmax = dsp.getMaximum( dataSet );
}
}

function beforeGeneration( chart, icsc )
{
var yAxis = chart.getAxes().get(0).getAssociatedAxes().get(0);
var yScale = yAxis.getScale();
yScale.setMin(DateTimeDataElementImpl.create(mmin));
yScale.setMax(DateTimeDataElementImpl.create(mmax));
yAxis.setScale(yScale);
}

The last topic for this week is about alternating the color of the row dimension field in a crosstab. The poster wanted to be able to alternate the color in the row dimension column, in a crosstab. For example, they wanted to have the first row be blue, the second gray, the third blue, and so on. They were pointed to the following devShare post to help them achieve what they were wanting to do:

http://www.birt-exch...t-using-script/

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. Forum traffic has been very high, as of late. EclipseCon is this week, so I'll be there, instead of in the forums. So, if you see a question you know the answer to, please feel free to provide your suggestions or solution. I'll be back, next week, though. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic for this week is about creating custom group intervals for crosstabs. The poster has groupings they'd like to create in their crosstab so they can do aggregations over these groups. However, their groups are non-linear ranges. If anyone has created custom grouping ranges for crosstabs and has a suggestion or solution, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover this week is about changing the title of the BIRT viewer. The poster wanted to change/remove the "BIRT Report Viewer" text from the title bar and page header. The solution to this is to simply use the __title URL parameter to assign a new value.

The last topic from last week is about changing colors by series in a chart. The poster wanted to know how they could specify a series to change the color of in their chart script. They knew how to change the color, just not how to do it only for a certain script. A simple snippet of code is included in the thread that should get this done.

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. Traffic is slowing down a little bit, it seems, but the forums are still busy. They were just REALLY busy before! :) Many great questions and answers were posted. 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 dynamic ACL expressions. The poster is using Actuate BIRT and is trying to find a way to write a data row security expression that would cover all roles for a particular country to see the reports for their country. Currently, they specify "manager" and "staff" in the list, but they'd like to be able to do something like "*" + country in case any new roles are created. If anyone has experienced a similar situation and has suggestions, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover this week is about creating a row number in a crosstab. The solution to be able to add a row number to a crosstab is to simply add a grid to the outer dimension and use a dynamic textbox to increment a previously initialized variable. A more detailed explanation can be found in the thread.

The last topic for this week is about multi-select cascading parameters. When creating a cascading parameter, the multi-select option is only available on the final parameter of the group. However, the poster found a solution to allow them to be able to do so. A link to their devShare post that describes what they did 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.

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 traffic in the forums continues to be very high. Many great questions and answers were posted. 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 accessing a session variable from external application in BIRT report. The poster wants to be able to call their BIRT report in a JSP embedded viewer and pass a session variable into BIRT to be used in their where clause. If anyone has an example of this or a description of what needs to be done, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover from last week is about setting a page break in a crosstab using script. The poster wanted to be able to dynamically add a page break in script, based on a parameter selected by the user. Usually you can set the page break interval on a group in the onPrepare method of the crosstab. However, in this case, the dimensions are being edited dynamically in the beforeFactory, so this simple solution didn't work. An example report showing a way to do this is included in the thread.

The last post I'll cover this week is about displaying "no data" when your csv source file is blank. If you're using a csv file as your source and your csv file will always have the header info, this won't happen to you. However, if your csv file is completely empty when there is no data, then you'll get errors if a report element uses the dataSet that tries to access this file. The solution offered in the thread to get around this involves reading in the file in script prior to running the dataSet, so you can drop any elements that might use this data from the report. This avoids any errors. 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.

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 in the last month of the quarter, now, and the forums are as busy as ever. This could be a year for the record books! As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from this past week is about dynamically changing the height of an image elemnt. The poster wants to change the height/width of the images in their report based on the attribute in their XML dataSource. If anyone has a suggestion or solution for this. Please post in the thread.

The next post I'll cover for this week is about setting up a tooltip in a crosstab. The poster wanted to be able to add a tooltip to their crosstab, using java. A solution is provided that shows how this can be done by using HTML script tags in a text element.

The last topic I'll cover from last week is about sticking an element to the bottom of the last page. This is a highly requested feature that is not available, yet. A link to one of the possible workarounds is available in the thread. A link to an enhancement request is also in the thread if you'd like to "vote" for the enhancement.

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.