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Both open source BIRT and Actuate BIRT has its default parameter collection mechanism. If a report design uses parameters, you are prompted to enter its values though an auto generated parameter collection screen. This default parameter collection screen works well for most common needs, however there are times when you want to provide your own parameter collection mechanism in a web page (as a part of your application) and display the results.

If you are using open source sample viewer you can achieve this by using viewer tag library. The Viewer tab library has three tags that helps define parameter entry page: param, parameterPage, paramDef. You can read more about these along with an example of tag lib usage here.

Actuate Viewer comes with Javascript API client library (JSAPI) that enables creation of custom web pages in any (java or non-java) application. It has a separate class (actuate.Parameter) that handles parameters and parameter values. You can call class methods to download the parameters from the report and display them in the assigned <div> HTML element etc. If you prefer not to use this class and instead have your own mechanism to collect parameters, you can simply pass the collected parameter values to the report using actuate.Viewer.setParameters method call. e.g
viewer.setParameters(myParams);
Here is a link to my recent Devshare article with a couple of examples, one that uses actuate.Parameter class to display parameters and another that doesn’t. You can download the above example and run it with your own instance of BIRT iServer. If you don’t have BIRT iServer, you can download 45 day free evaluation copy and set it up in 15 minutes or less.