BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> BIRT Rocks!

Actuate BIRT has a new ODA in version 11 that will make it easy to use plain old java objects as a data source.

The setup involves simply pointing ODA to the java library containing POJO's and collection classes in a relative or absolute location.

Once configured you can map public getter methods in Java classes to (whose return type is not void) to data set columns. You can also choose to implement a very simple access interface(IPojoDataSet) that helps working with a collection of these objects to create a data set with multiple rows. Here is a quick video that shows how this is done.
The new ODA also allows you to directly use POJO objects stored in application context. The collection object stored in context can be in the form of java.util.Iterator or java.util.Collection or java.lang.Object[] and is accessed via application context key specified in your data set definition in BIRT design.
POJO's are already popular with data persistence frameworks like Hibernate, Toplink and with this new connector you will be able to leverage these data objects without any extra coding effort. Download the latest release of Actuate to test drive this new ODA.

Ashwini Verma