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

Last Week in the Forums - 8/20/12

The first post, for this week, is about coloring a bar based on a threshold value. The poster wanted to be able to color the portion of the bar that passed a threshold value. Say, there was a chart threshold of 50 and there were three bars valued at 75, 55, and 45. The first two bars would be one color up to 50, then another color above. The last bar would be entirely the first color. What is done in this case is to use two series. One that goes all the way up to the threshold, if the value is that high, and the other to continue above the threshold if needed. This allows for two colors at the threshold line. An example report can be found in the forum thread.

The next post, for this week, is about creating a chart in script. The poster wanted to know if it was possible to create a chart, on the fly, in script. An example can be found in the forum that shows how to create a chart, in script, using an existing dataSet.

Here are a few more :

• Alternating row colors for detail row?
  
• Create pie chart programmatically ?
  
• Compare date ranges
  
• Reading and setting the report-parameters in Birt Report Viewer jsp
  
• Setting Image on Runtime

Here are a few unanswered posts, from last week:

• AuthenticationMethod SQL connectivity
  
• JSAPI to get list of reports

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 have been CRAZY busy, it seems, this new year, so far! 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 unanswered topic from last week is about passing parameters from JSF pages with Seam. The poster is having issues passing parameters to BIRT from their JSF pages. They're able to send static values, but not dynamic values. If anyone has encountered this issue or have a suggestion or solution, please post it in the thread!

The next topic for this week is summing two values from separate grids and displaying the sum in the report. One way to sum values from two different elements in a report is to use persistent global variables to store the values and then recall them and add them together where you want to display the sum. There are probably several ways that this can be done, but this is one of them. In this question, the poster also wanted to display the value before the elements the actual data is in. To do this, you can store the values in PGVs in your onCreate script and recall them in your onRender script to display the sum. You'll have to run the run and render tasks separately for this to work.

The last topic for this week is how to hide the details of a report based on a parameter. The poster had a grouped table with details. They wanted to be able to hide the detail section based on a user parameter. To do this, all you need to do is add visibility script to the detail row. A simple script is included in the thread that shows how to do so. The visibility settings can be found in the property editor of the element you're wanting to hide.

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've got less than 2 months left in the year. It's crazy how time flies. The traffic and increased community involvement has been awesome so far, this year, including some wonderful entries in the recent plugin contest. Let's not stop that trend! :) 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!

For this week's unanswered post, I'll cover one about problems with parameters in a web service data source. The poster has a web service that they can get to work correctly when testing in soapUI, but when they create a dataSource in BIRT, they are not getting their SOAP parameters for the WebMethod to show up in the dataSource wizard. If anyone has experienced a similar issue and knows how to get around it or knows what might be going wrong, feel free to provide a suggestion or solution to help this community member out! Thanks!

The next topic I'll discuss for this week is about dynamically hiding columns based on a parameter. This is a common question in the forums. How can you let your user choose which columns they want to see with a parameter. In the referenced thread, there is a link to a devShare article that should help with this. Here is a link to the example:

Dynamic Columns Based on Parameter

The last topic for this week is about formatting dates in a dynamic text box. The question was initially just how to format a date within a dynamic text box. A link to another forum thread with an answer to the same question was provided. Then, it was added that the formatting in the text box must be dynamic for US or European date format. A solution is provided that shows some rough code that shows how to use a parameter to decide which format to use. This code can be seen in the example. If anyone follows the rough code in this example and creates working code, please feel free to post the working code to the example.

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 have been busy all year. Quite a bit busier than last year, it seems, though I don't have the numbers on this in front of me. :) Luckily, many members are contributing answers to help with the extra traffic. 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 first topic for this week is how to get today's string day (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) into your chart title. The poster wanted to grab the day of week from today's date and create their chart title with this value. This can be done by creating a date format that only shows the string day of week and then using the value in your chart script to set the title of the chart. An example is shown in the forum thread that shows how to do this. If you're not interested in setting the day of week in the title, but just want to dynamically set your chart title, this example will also be helpful.

The second topic for this week is about passing data between queries in a report. Sometimes you need to use data from one dataSet to get the appropriate data from another for your report. One way to do this is to create a joint dataSet to join all of the data, but if you have large amounts of data, this can cause processing to be very slow. The ideal way to do this is to take the data from the first dataSet and pass it as a parameter in the second query. There are at least a couple ways to do this in BIRT. One is to use a dataSet parameter in the second dataSet, embed a table for this dataSet into a table for the first dataSet, and use the dataSet parameter binding feature to pass the value from the outer table to the inner table's query to grab only the appropriate data. Another way, that is described in the forum thread is to embed the second dataSet's table into the first dataSet's table and in the onCreate script of the outer table, you'd set a global variable to have the value you want to limit your inner query by, and then in the beforeOpen of the inner dataSet, you can use this variable to set your where clause in your queryText.

The last topic for this week is how to create a rolling sum in your dataSet. There are standard aggregations to create a sum for an entire column or to keep the running sum, but a rolling sum for a specified period is not a standard aggregation. The poster wanted to be able to keep a sum of their data fro the last 12 months. When they reached the 13th month, they wanted to disclude the first month from the total. To do this, you can create a computed column in your dataSet that uses an array to keep track of the previous values so you can create your rolling sum. An example is included in the forum 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.