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BIRT 360 lets you link up your gadgets in the dashboard, so any changes you make to one gadget would change information displayed in other gadgets. Dashboard gadgets are based on a publisher/subscriber model, so a data selector gadget publishes the data to its subscriber gadgets when a user changes a value on the gadget, such as country selection in a list would update the sales by region chart. See this live example
A data publisher gadget can also be a subscriber at the same time which means this concept could be easily extended to create a cascading effect. For example, selecting a country would change the list of states available in a different gadget and selecting a state there would update the list of cities in a third gadget, and all of these gadgets together can link to a regional sales report.
Data in these selector gadgets can either come from either a BIRT Data Object (see my earlier blog on BIRT data object) or it could be derived from a BIRT report. When a BIRT report is added to a dashboard, the system has built-in smarts to figure out if the report has parameters, and gives you the option to present those parameters as a part of the report gadget OR in a separate data selector gadget that you could reuse to link additional gadgets.

Linking gadgets is easy and involves matching the published data field from the data selection gadget to a data field in the data visualization gadget, see how.
Gadgets on a dashboard that link to the same data object are automatically linked when a user adds a new gadget to the dashboard. Other gadgets such as imported gadgets or HTML gadgets can also link to data selection gadgets. The dashboard designer must add Javascript to these gadgets to receive and process values and events that they receive.
BIRT 360 is available as a option within BIRT iServer. Download your free evaluation copy of BIRT iServer and give it a try.

Like to try out new BIRT iServer but don't necessarily want to install just yet? Starting with version 11 sp1, you have the option to download BIRT iServer Evaluation Version as a zip file and start the server from a command line after unzipping the package to a convenient location.
The start up script automatically determines the path settings, sets up the pre-requisite components , create storage repository and optionally uploads sample reports. It then opens up a new command prompt window that serves as a console from which the server can be shut down and restarted. When you are finished with evaluation you can simply delete the folder to wipe your system clean.
The zip installer uses JDK that is already installed on your system and hence results in a smaller download size. Also since there is no installation involved, this approach allows for easy creation of stateless image for cloud deployment. Download this all new zip package and explore BIRT iServer platform for deploying, managing, securing, scheduling, running and distributing BIRT documents.

Ashwini Verma