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A BIRT report document is a binary file that contains report design information along with cached data. You can generate a report document from a report design within your BIRT designer by choosing Run->Generate Document from the menu, it generates a file with extension ".rptdocument"

A report document can be rendered into a formatted report output much faster since it does not involve roundtrip to the data source and is most useful in cases where connecting to and querying a data source is resource intensive or when data changes are infrequent or when the data source is offline.
Data saved inside a BIRT document can also be leveraged by another BIRT report though a ODA available in BIRT Designer Professional. Using data from a report document provides benefits like:
1. Faster report generation time because the report does not have to connect to an external data source
2. Reuses calculated data such as aggregation
3. Simplifies report creation since there is no data connection set up involved and you don’t have to deal with complex SQL queries.
When used as a data source the report document provides access to result set created for each table, chart and list. See this video to learn how this ODA works or download BIRT Designer Professional and give this feature a try.
Ashwini