BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Community BIRT

We are still looking for more developers to build new BIRT plug-ins as part of the Plug In 2 BIRT contest. There are less than two weeks left before the deadline -- but that's plenty of time to get your code built and submitted.

You say you've never built a plug-in before?
No problem, they are easier to build than you might think! The contest web site has lots of tutorials and examples to help you get started. Plus you'll find a wealth of ideas and suggestions there for plug-ins that many BIRT users have asked for.

Take a look and give it a shot for a chance to win an iPad (we're giving 3 away). We'd love to see what you can come up with.

The winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for November 2012 is Tapash Kumar Sahu (Tapash Kumar Sahu) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Twitter JSON Search ODA.

Tapash said, "The idea behind implementing Twitter Search plugin (using JSON) was to create a plugin for BIRT to follow any tweet posted by anyone without requiring authentication in twitter. It serves the purpose of following someone and finding a tweet and series of events or tweets. It is user centric and follows the twitter paradigm, by literally following someone on twitter. The user doesn’t require a twitter account to use this plugin. Since this is a Search API, there are lots of ways to enhance it using authentication which are some enhancements I intend to bring in."

Tapash works at Subex Limited as a System Analyst on a framework team. He has worked on integrating BIRT with their Web based products and started looking at BIRT as a BI Tool for an upcoming product when he encountered the Plug In 2 BIRT contest. Tapash said, "I don't have much competency in usage of BIRT as I mostly worked on Integration of BIRT with our products. So working on this plugin enhanced my knowledge of BIRT in usage point of view. Now I am pretty much comfortable using BIRT. I'm really thankful to the BIRT Community and the DevShare contributors as I was able to get lots of help and information from your website."

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

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.

Notice: We have discontinued the monthly contest for now and will likely bring it back in the future in some other form.

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

The Plug In 2 BIRT Contest for Autumn 2012 is closed, but you can help the judges by voting on your favorite and commenting on the DevShare contest submissions to tell us (and the authors) what you like best or any areas for improvement you discover.

Plug-in extensions are one of the great strengths of BIRT and something we at Actuate really want to promote. Developers put a lot of effort into their creations and a great way to help them realize how much you appreciate their work is by providing feedback. Most developers are proud of what they do and are happy to make improvements -- but they have to know what is needed. I encourage you to comment on any DevShare article -- and be specific -- whether it helps you or if you think something could make it better.

As for creating your own plug-in extension, don't wait for a contest to get started; there are plenty of ideas, information and tutorials available -- enough to build something awesome and earn you respect and appreciation from BIRT users around the world!

Plug In 2 BIRT for Autumn 2012 Contest Entries

1. REST API ODA PLUGIN FOR BIRT– arjung
This is a generic plugin which can connect to many data sources including Yahoo, Google, social medias (facebook, twitter etc),sports,news and many more. This plugin uses REST API supporting JSON and it gives tabular data to user.

2. XMLA ODA for BIRT – Pulak Bose
The XMLA ODA plugin for BIRT is an Eclipse based plugin which enables you to connect to an XMLA provider like Pentaho Mondrian, EssBase, SAP BW and pull out data to display in your BIRT report.

3. BIRT Group Functions Plugin – Hans_vd
In order to be able to create aggregations within groups of data in a data set, I created three new aggregations: GROUPCOUNT, GROUPROWNUM and GROUPSUM. All three take a parameter “Aggregate on”, that can take a data set column as a value.

4. Multi Flat file ODA for BIRT– Megha Nidhi Dahal
ODA extension that enables use of any supported flatfile (csv, tsv, psv and ssv) into a single data set.

5. Heat Map chart plugin – Raghava
This plugin helps us to create heatmap chart to analyize performance of different companies, periodic table, employee attendance, stock market investments etc.

6. OctoBirt Driver v2 for GitHub Commits – wcheung
ODA driver to access commits in GitHub repositories - just specify GitHub info and a range, and get back commits in your report. Required for usage with the new GitHub REST API.

7. Twitter JSON Search ODA - Plug In 2 BIRT – Tapash Kumar Sahu
This ODA searches all the recent tweets using Twitter JSON SearchvAPI based on the search query written in data set.

The winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for October 2012 is Sérgio Gomes (smgomes) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: PDF rendering different fonts.

Sérgio said, "My contribution is related to the problems of fonts in different operating systems. Even though they are installed on the system and the report is configured to be drawn with the right font (i.e., Verdana), in the visualization process it appears unconfigured and with the Times New Roman font."

Sérgio is 28, and lives in Portugal where he is currently working as a software developer at DeltaFIL, Informática e Sistemas Digitais where he develops management software called Projecto Colibri, using Java - Rich Client Platform. Sérgio has used BIRT since 2007 to integrate the reports in his application. He remarks, "I continue to use this great tool to provide more efficient and effective reports."

Sérgio 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 November 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.

The winner of the BIRT Exchange Contributor of the Month Contest for September 2012 is John Ward (johnw) for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Tutorial: Writing BIRT Emitters: XML and JPEG Emitter.

John said, "This entry was written to help get more information out there on how to write BIRT extension points. With the increasing number of BIRT contests on the BIRT Exchange, a lot of developers don’t know how to begin writing plugins. This article was written to help plugin writers have a starting point with the emitter framework, so we can start seeing more exciting emitters for BIRT out in the wild. In particular, this addresses getting developers started with the Page framework for the emitter framework, an area that has little to no practical examples out there that show how to write more pixel precise outputs for BIRT."

Note: This is timely too since Actuate has announced the Plug In 2 BIRT Autumn 2012 Contest which will award a 32GB 4th generation iPad for each of the three best BIRT plug-in extensions submitted by November 30th. Check it out!

John has been using BIRT since its beginnings back in 2004. Back then he was looking for a free, open source reporting framework that worked similar to the commercial report designers out there. He says, "Back then I was looking for a report writer to address writing incident reports for a network security company. Little did I know where that would take me. These days I am helping people learn how to integrate BIRT into their products."

John 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 November 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.

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.

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.

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.