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. This was a slow week in the forums, compared to other weeks this year, probably due to Thanksgiving, but it was still fairly busy. 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!

This week's unanswered question is about figuring out how many line breaks are in a text box. The problem is that when you have multiple lines of text, BIRT doesn't give you the information on how many lines it will take up. This poster wants to know this information so they can size their containing grids appropriately. If anyone knows a good way to determine the number of lines based on the font, font size, and space available, please post your comments or solutions in the thread! Thanks!

The next question for this week is about numbering your groupings in a table. The question here is how to get BIRT to number the groups in a table. A standard "runningcount" aggregation doesn't work because of the grouping on the table. This would count the detail rows, but not the groups. A custom binding could be created in your dataSet to do this. The solution provided in the forum thread is to create a global variable in your initialize method, increment this variable in each group header, and display the variable value in a text box in your group. If anyone has any other solutions, feel free to add them to the thread!

The last topic for this week is about using dataSet parameter markers and dataSet parameters. The poster was wondering how to use parameters within their query. The answer to this was to use "?" parameter markers within the query. The next question was how does BIRT know which parameter goes with each marker within a query if there are multiple markers, since there is no distinction between them. The answer to this is the order. The order that the "?" markers in the query are, are the order in which the parameters in the dataSet tab are.

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.