BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Last week in the Forums: Time Stamp as Parameter Through Command Line, Dynamically Setting Min/Max of DateTime X-Axis, and more...

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.