BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Last week in the Forums: PostgreSQL Function Issue, Exporting Charts to XLS, 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. Busy, busy, busy! Forum traffic continues to be heavy as we move closer and closer to the half way point. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post, for this past week, is about an encoding issue while running a postgresql function in BIRT. When they run the function in pSQL or pgAdmin, they don't have an issue, just when running the function from BIRT. They get the following error:

22021: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xf6206f72

If anyone has seen this before or has a suggestion for them to try, please post in the thread!

The next issue I'll discuss is about exporting charts to XLS. The standard BIRT XLS emitter doesn't export images. Since charts are images in the BIRT output, the XLS emitter skips over them. There are several third party emitters created to export XLS outputs. Several of the options available can be found linked in this forum thread!

The last topic I'll discuss is about displaying the series name on top of a bar when optional grouping is used. When you use optional y-series grouping, in your chart, the series identifier you have available to you in the data point functions of the chart script will show you the grouped series, not the original series name. The poster wanted to be able to place the original series name at the top of the bar. An example is provided, in the thread, that shows how you can access the original series name and place it over the appropriate stacked bar.

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.