BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Community BIRT

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for September 2012. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we will evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We also added a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls.

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

This introductory training series is designed for those unfamiliar or just getting started with BIRT. During the day you will hear about technical strategies and opportunities that will help you anticipate and address future business needs –plus– learn how to develop rich information applications for your users through hands-on training that covers Eclipse and Actuate BIRT features.

These Roadshows are great ways to learn more about BIRT whether you're an Eclipse open source developer or an Actuate customer. Lunch is provided as well as giveaways and door prizes so you can expect an informative day with a chance to meet other BIRT users in your area and have a little fun.

Don't miss this opportunity to take part in one of these events.

The winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for August 2012 is Hans van Dorst (Hans_vd) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Dates in BIRT datasets.

Hans said, "The issue with dates and date formats that is described in my blogpost in the context of a BIRT report, is actually a very general one. There are a lot of tools/languages where you have to deal with this. Especially for junior developers it seems hard to understand that a date is just a date and that the formatting of it is something you need to take care of yourself: either by doing it explicitly every time, or by setting your default settings right."

Hans lives in Belgium and has been working with BIRT for three years since his team did a proof of concept at a client's site, investigating the possibilities of integrating BIRT with the enterprise application and building example reports. They also installed Actuate iServer at the client. Hans has been one of our top contributors on BIRT Exchange and you'll often find him answering the questions of other BIRT developers on BIRT Exchange. He tells us, "I like being part of the BIRT community and I'll be certainly supporting it in the future!"

Hans chose a $200 Amazon Gift Card for his award.

It's not too late... to get your own DevShare article posted in time for next month's contest that closes on September 30th. If you"ve cooked up something that you can share with the BIRT Exchange community, please post it soon! You can create a tutorial, build a BIRT application, template or component, or write up some of the tips and solutions to problems you've run into during the past -- anything that's helped you use BIRT more effectively will probably be useful to others too. And don't forget the BIRT Exchange Marketplace. A code-based DevShare submission could also be a great candidate for the Marketplace.

See the Contributor of the Month Contest Rules and the list of previous winners for more information about the contest.

I got a little behind lately, but am very pleased to announce that the winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for July 2012 is Jason Verly (jverly01) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Implement Maximo 7.5.0.3 BIRT fix in 7.1.1.x.

Jason said, "I'm the Maximo administrator for our company and part those duties include BIRT report development. I am currently on a conversion project to move all of our Maximo related reports from various platforms to BIRT. One of the common things in all enterprise applications is eventually a newer version comes out. A common catch with newer versions of software is that it fixes or improves on something that won't be corrected in the current version. IBM recently came out with a new fix patch for their Maximo 7.5.x release, which included moving to an updated BIRT platform (3.7.1). Part of the update that IBM made in the fix patch was the inclusion of a command line tool to automatically add some code to the beforeFactory method to existing reports. The code fixed some pagination issues in BIRT reports when exported to PDF. Doing some digging I found that this code could be manually applied to existing reports for the Maximo 7.1.7, and later, environments. Maximo 7.1.6, and later, users an older version of BIRT (2.3.2) and was happy to find a way to back port a fix to an older release. The code fix allowed me to correct a problem I was having with a specific set of custom reports I had recently developed as part of our migration from Business Objects. My post was meant to share this discovery with other Maximo BIRT developers."

Jason chose a $200 Amazon Gift Card for his award.

It's not too late... to get your own DevShare article posted in time for next month's contest that closes on September 30th. If you"ve cooked up something that you can share with the BIRT Exchange community, please post it soon! You can create a tutorial, build a BIRT application, template or component, or write up some of the tips and solutions to problems you've run into during the past -- anything that's helped you use BIRT more effectively will probably be useful to others too. And don't forget the BIRT Exchange Marketplace. A code-based DevShare submission could also be a great candidate for the Marketplace.

See the Contributor of the Month Contest Rules and the list of previous winners for more information about the contest.

I got a little behind lately but am very pleased to announce that the winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for June 2012 is George Hardigg (georgeh12) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Removing Blank Line in Multi-select Cascading Parameter.

George said, "My tutorial addresses an end-user issue where users received an error message when selecting parameters on a list box. When the user selected options in a required list box parameter, they would receive an error saying they must choose an option. This was due to the blank option being interpreted as an error by the Javascript code on the parameter page. The steps in this tutorial remove the blank option, so users are not mislead to believe that a blank could be chosen for a required parameter."

George is a programming enthusiast, particularly Javascript. In his free time he can be found at flight training or on the basketball court. George has been with Auxis for almost 2 years now as an Enterprise Architecture Consultant. Auxis provides a variety of IT services, including service and infrastructure outsourcing, and his division, Government Services. George provides support to the US Patent & Trademark Office by doing server administration and application development.

He tells us, "I have been using BIRT for over 15 months during the process of customizing our enterprise management application. Currently, I have been building BIRT reports that push server architecture data to different organizations within USPTO. Also, I have been working on custom parameter pages."

George chose a $200 VISA Gift Card for his award.

We also want to thank the other eligible DevShare contributor for participating in June's contest:

• Creating a ReportDocument without file access by Jan Kohner -- When creating a ReportDocument to extract data from a report or to store the document bytes, this MemoryArchive Class (implements IDocArchiveWriter and IDocArchiveReader) may be used when file access is not wanted.

It's not too late... to get your own DevShare article posted in time for next month's contest that closes on September 30th. If you"ve cooked up something that you can share with the BIRT Exchange community, please post it soon! You can create a tutorial, build a BIRT application, template or component, or write up some of the tips and solutions to problems you've run into during the past -- anything that's helped you use BIRT more effectively will probably be useful to others too. And don't forget the BIRT Exchange Marketplace. A code-based DevShare submission could also be a great candidate for the Marketplace.

See the Contributor of the Month Contest Rules and the list of previous winners for more information about the contest.

If you've been following the most prestigious sporting competitions this year, do we have a treat for you!

Dash for Gold (http://dashforgold.com) is an online web application hosted on Actuate's BIRT onDemand cloud service. We've partnered with KXEN, a big data analytics company to make predictions on event winners based on world environmental and economic indicators, plus we've built some cool dashboards that uncover some interesting sports statistics and fun facts.

Dash for Gold is a FREE web application - no download or installation required.

There's a special mobile version to keep you up-to-date on your tablet. Just point its web browser to:
http://www.dashforgold.com/mobile.

But the interactive analytics is where the fun really starts. Dazzle your friends and colleagues with new levels of sports trivia:

• The best fencers come from northern latitudes
  
• Countries with a higher CO2 footprint tend to outperform greener countries
  
• Wine consumption hurts chances of medaling
  
• Countries with high populations of children tend to dominate in swimming

And don’t stop there… see how easy it is to create your own dashboards with Dash for Gold.

Contest
What would a BIRT Community promotion be without a contest? Submit your best dashboard creations to the BIRT Dash for Gold Contest before August 15, 2012 for a chance to win one of four 3rd generation 32GB iPads.

If you're interested in seeing what people have submitted to the Contest so far, you can check out screenshots and descriptions on the public Contest Showcase and vote for your favorites using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. The most highly voted dashboards get bragging rights for being the most popular in the world.

We hope to see yours among them!

The winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for May 2012 is Jason Verly (jverly01) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: How to embed a .js file into Maximo BIRT report.

Jason said, "The main reason I worked out this method was that out of the box BIRT doesn't have a string function to change the case of a text string from upper or mixed case to proper case (LAZY BROWN FOX -> Lazy Brown Fox). So when I needed to manipulate the case of a text field in a report, I referenced a javascript file to perform that in the report. The next step was getting the report to still reference the javascript function in the external file once it was loaded into Maximo. Adding the javascript file as a zipped file allowed Maximo to continue to reference the javascript function when the report was run inside Maximo."

Jason is a project engineer for a private company in Minnesota. He has been using BIRT for about 3 years as part of his company's upgrade to IBM Maximo v7. Over the past year Jason has been more focused on expanding the use of BIRT as part of their Maximo platform. He says, "The first push we've made is using the QBR functionality (essentially an ad hoc BIRT report writer) inside of Maximo. This has lead to a broader push to make BIRT the default report tool for Maximo, which includes migrating approximately 120 Crystal BO reports over to BIRT. The goal is to be completely moved over to BIRT by Feb 2013."

Jason chose a $200 Amazon Gift Card for his award.

We also want to thank the other eligible DevShare contributor for participating in May's contest:

• Gantt Chart Auto Axis Scale Example by RaphaelM -- This Example demonstrates that the y-axis of a gantt chart always starts one time unit earlier than the data.

It's not too late... to get your own DevShare article posted in time for next month's contest that closes on June 30th. If you"ve cooked up something that you can share with the BIRT Exchange community, please post it soon! You can create a tutorial, build a BIRT application, template or component, or write up some of the tips and solutions to problems you've run into during the past -- anything that's helped you use BIRT more effectively will probably be useful to others too. And don't forget the BIRT Exchange Marketplace. A code-based DevShare submission could also be a great candidate for the Marketplace.

See the Contributor of the Month Contest Rules and the list of previous winners for more information about the contest.

This introductory training series is designed for those unfamiliar or just getting started with BIRT. During the day you will hear about technical strategies and opportunities that will help you anticipate and address future business needs –plus– learn how to develop rich information applications for your users through hands-on training that covers Eclipse and Actuate BIRT features.

These Roadshows are great ways to learn more about BIRT whether you're an Eclipse open source developer or an Actuate customer. Lunch is provided as well as giveaways and door prizes so you can expect an informative day with a chance to meet other BIRT users in your area and have a little fun.

Don't miss this opportunity to take part in one of these events.

I'm pleased to announce the members of the BIRT Exchange Community Leaderboard for May 2012. The purpose of this Leaderboard is to honor the top contributors to BIRT Exchange each month and to have a little fun. Scores are also posted on the BIRT Exchange Connect page. You can recognize past and current Leaderboard members by special badges on their forum and DevShare posts:


To determine the leaders, each contribution made by a BIRT Exchange member is assigned a weighted point score that roughly corresponds to its effort/value. For example, starting a forum topic by asking a question will score you 1 point and answering someone's question scores 3 points. Members with the top summed scores each month are declared the leaders for that month and posted to the Leaderboard. Over time we will evolve the scoring system as needed for fairness and value to the community. We also added a point for voting on the BIRT Exchange Community home page polls.

So please contribute to BIRT Exchange. It's not difficult to get a decent score and we'd love to see you on the Leaderboard next month!

You can find details on the Community Leaderboard Wiki. If you have any suggestions or comments, please add them to this blog post (they're worth 2 points).

The winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for April 2012 is Ankit Garg for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Mongo DB ODA Plugin for BIRT.

Ankit (ankit garg) said, "Mongo DB ODA plugin provides a new Data Source that allows a user to quickly connect to Mongo databases. It not only extracts the data but also allows one to filter the data in SQL and JSON format to provide more usability in BIRT reports. I created this plugin to let BIRT users populate mongo db collections data in BIRT reports in a more flexible and convenient way as it is simple as querying SQL instead of JSON format."

Ankit is an employee of Subex Ltd in India where he's worked as a Software Engineer for the last year. He has been using BIRT for almost one year and uses it in his product for report generation. He says, "It is amazing."

Ankit chose a $200 Amazon Gift for his award.

We also want to thank the other 13 eligible DevShare contributors for participating in April's contest:

• BIRT XML Emitter by johnw -- The purpose of this emitter is to assist report developers who would like to unit test their report designs. It can be used for a number of other use cases, such as running through an XSLT transformation.
  
• Google Analytics ODA Plugin by arjung -- Google Analytics ODA plugin extracts data from from Google Analytics account and feeds the same to Birt, which can be used to create custom reports.
  
• Modified BIRT HTML Emitter by johnw -- The purpose of this emitter is to allow a report developer to modify the HTML header that is generated in HTML based reports.
  
• Report Document ODA by johnw -- The purpose of this ODA is to allow BIRT Report Developers use existing RPTDOCUMENT files as a data source.
  
• Report Design Extractor by johnw -- This is a plugin for Eclipse that will create a new View that will extract a RPTDesign from a RPTDocument and create Data Sources that will allow someone to connect to the RPTdocument. This was created as a utility for diagnosing and troubleshooting.
  
• New Report Item for Report Parameter by Mikkel T A -- This plugin provides a new Report Item in the palette that allows the user to quickly add a Report Parameters display text (single or MULTI select). Great for displaying report parameters inside report without the need of coding skills.
  
• Cassandra DB ODA Plugin by arjung -- Cassandra ODA Plugin can connect to Cassandra Data base and pull out data to create custom reports using birt.
  
• YQL ODA Plugin by Subhas -- Provides a unified interface to the report designers to use different Web Services as BIRT Data Source using Yahoo! Query Language(YQL) a query language similar to SQL.
  
• SpudSoft Jensoft Charts for BIRT by Yaytay -- A preview of a charting plugin to make open source BIRT charts prettier.
  
• Multi Flat File Aggregator by Raghava -- An ODA driver to aggregate or map multiple flat files.
  
• BIRT Barcode Extension for BIRT 2.6-3.7.2 - cbrell The BIRT Barcode Extensions adds a BarcodeItem to the Designer Palette.
  
• Dropbox ODA by vwine -- Allows BIRT users to create Dropbox usage reports.
  
• BIRT: Dynamically Hiding/Showing Table Columns in a Report Design by johnw -- This question gets asked quite often in the BIRT Exchange Forums. How can I dynamically show/hide columns in a table based on user input/some object property.

It's not too late... to get your own DevShare article posted in time for next month's contest that closes on June 30th. If you"ve cooked up something that you can share with the BIRT Exchange community, please post it soon! You can create a tutorial, build a BIRT application, template or component, or write up some of the tips and solutions to problems you've run into during the past -- anything that's helped you use BIRT more effectively will probably be useful to others too. And don't forget the BIRT Exchange Marketplace. A code-based DevShare submission could also be a great candidate for the Marketplace.

See the Contributor of the Month Contest Rules and the list of previous winners for more information about the contest.