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Last Week in the Forums - 8/13/12

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 pick the pace back up and are pretty busy, now. 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 first topic, for this week, is about flowing report content across multiple page columns. The issue in this post is that there is not a standard newspaper layout, in BIRT, yet. The normal solution for this is to use a grid, duplicate tables, and filters to make the appearance of wrapping columns. The issue the poster was having with this was that they had multi-line rows that caused issues with ordering. The solution provided was to break the original dataSet's long rows into single line rows, allowing the normal solution to work. An example is posted in the thread showing this. Another example showing this with grouping, is also attached in the thread.

The last in detail topic, from last week, is about formatting currency values in an HTML text box. The poster was displaying a value using the <value-of> tag, in an HTML text box, so they could include it in a string, but they wanted it to come as a currency value, with symbol and decimal. The solution is that you can set a format property on the value-of tag, telling it how you want the value formatted, like: <VALUE-OF format="$#,##0.00{RoundingMode=HALF_UP}">row._outer["yourColumn"]</VALUE-OF>

Here are a few more :

• iServer Users Jobs View of Others
  
• Exception Handling in BIRT Viewer
  
• Couldn't Export Different Locale to the PDF Report
  
• Flash Map Questions
  
• Dynamically Scale SVG Graph

Here are a few unanswered posts, from last week:

• Centering an A4 Size Report in any Monitor
  
• How to get Client IP Address
  
• Send Parameters to Reports/Dashboards from the SecurityAdapter

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. 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.