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. EclipseCon was good, last week. Lots of BIRT users in attendance. If you were there, hopefully you swung by and saw us. The forums were a little bit slow, last week, but I'm certain they'll pick right back up, this week. 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 passing a database connection to BIRT. The poster wants to be able to pass an existing database connection to BIRT so a new one doesn't have to be used. They show some code of how they're currently trying it. If anyone has done this and has suggestions, please post in the thread.

The next question, for this week, is about rotating a label text 90 degrees. The poster wanted to be able to rotate their header labels 90 degrees, so they could give a meaningful header to narrow columns. A solution of creating a rotated text report element is given as a solution. Another solution, if using XLS as your output, is built into the SpudSoft XLS emitter, which allows you to specify a rotation angle in a "UserProperty" and the emitter handles the rotation.

The last post I'll cover, from last week, is about aggregating across multiple tables. The poster wanted to be able to be able to add two totals, from two different tables together. The solution given was a devShare post that shows how to use global variables in script to store the values, so you can access them elsewhere in script to do your calculations. A link to the devShare post can be found 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.