BIRT Rocks!

BIRT at Eclipse Demo Camp Juno 2012

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 19:25:00 +0000

I was awarded a speaking slot at the Eclipse Demo Camp Juno 2012 next week on Wednesday, June 13 at Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores, CA. This is a great opportunity to network and learn about various technologies that makes Eclipse a great development platform. I will give an introduction to BIRT and talk about how you can integrate it into your applications. The event is completely free to attend and snacks and drinks are provided. Sounds like fun to me, are you in?

Cick on this link to find details and register for the event

Use BIRT to analyze cross tab data

Wed, 30 May 2012 19:15:00 +0000

If you have used Excel, you probably have used and liked the convenience of Pivot Tables to automatically sort, count and aggregate data displayed in a compact row and column matrix. Pivot Tables, also known as Cross Tab(ulations), helps you to analyze data and recognize patterns in it. While BIRT has been supporting crosstabs for a long time, in version 11 Actuate has added support to interact with a crosstab table and automatically create charts using just a web browser. The tool that enables this interactivity is called BIRT Data Analyzer and it is well integrated with Interactive Viewer.

A crosstab report leverages a multi-dimensional data structure called Cube that is optimized for analysis. A cube organizes data into Measures, Dimensions & Attributes and can be stored in BIRT Document or BIRT Objects (.data file) (See my earlier blog on BIRT Objects). You can launch up a cube stored in either format for analyses in Data Analyzer, take a look at the short video recording to see it in action:

See the above video in full screen.

Data Analyzer helps you discover trends and analyze information by providing the following features:

Add, remove or reorder attributes, dimensions and measures
Drill down display detail data or drill up to display summary data
Pivot the crosstab , which swaps the colums and rows
Sort data
Filter data
Display columns or rows that show aggregate data
Create a column to display calculated data
Choose from several chart types to display data
Export content to other formats (PDF, Excel, Word etc)

You can download the sample BIRT Object used in the recording from here. Working with Actuate BIRT Analyzer requires Actuate iServer, download an evaluation copy of Actuate iServer and give it a try.

Customize parameter collectors for your BIRT report

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:33:00 +0000

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

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.

Publishing reports to BIRT onDemand made easy!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:33:00 +0000

The latest release of Actuate makes it possible to publish your reports to BIRT onDemand directly from BIRT Designer. In addition to easy deployment you could now even browse and download deployed content from you onDemand Account. You no longer need to install any custom plugin to your BIRT Designer since the existing iServer Explorer plugin has been enhanced to support this new feature. This enhancement comes in the form of a "Profile Type" dropdown selection that enables you to choose between a onDemand or in-premise instance of BIRT iServer.

To publish content to BIRT onDemand you would follow the same simple procedure as you used to before starting out with defining a new profile. Here you will need to specify web service URL, login credentials and server/volume information. Once the profile is established you can use simple drag and drop operations to export content from designer. Here is a video that goes over the entire process.
Sign up for BIRT onDemand and download BIRT Designer Professional for a 45 day free trial.

Enable Interactivity in your BIRT Viewer

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:22:00 +0000

BIRT Interactive Viewer(IV) is an end user tool that enables you to analyze and modify BIRT reports on the web using just your browser. It is implemented as a viewing service of BIRT iServer and can be turned on for all the reports or for each report. This article explores different ways this can be achieved.

You can enable IV for an individual report by selecting "Enable Interactivity" option when you launch Actuate BIRT Viewer as shown in the screen shot below:

There might be cases where you may want to skip though the above step and enable interactivity for all the reports by default when they are launched. This can be achieved by setting the configuration variable "AutoEnableIV" to true defined in file "[Install Dir]\iServer\servletcontainer\iportal\WEB-INF\iv_config.xml". This configuration variable is defined for each role and so you will find multiple matching entries . Choose the role for which you want to apply this setting. Role "All" would enable this for all the users. This change requires a restart of BIRT iServer.

If you just want a specific report to open with IV enabled, and don't want to use the global approach described above, then you can add the following code to the individual report design in onContentUpdate handler method:
if (!this.getViewer().isInteractive())
this.getViewer().enableIV();

Actuate JSAPI (AJAX-based Javascript library) is another popular way of embedding BIRT reports within your composite web application and offers APIs to enable or disable interactivity. To enable it by default, use enableIV() API as a callback to submit() function call as follows (Download complete source code):
viewer.submit(function(v){
v.enableIV();
});

Learn more about Interactive Viewing or download BIRT iServer with Interactive Viewer for a 45 days free trial from here and experience its rich internet application platform.

BIRT goes Mobile!

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:40:00 +0000

A recent release of Actuate (version 11 sp2) now makes it possible to access BIRT content on mobile devices. This is made possible with all new iOS and Android based BIRT Mobile apps. Both are native apps and allows for BIRT content to be viewed on iPhone, iPad and Andriod Honeycomb tablet devices.

To view BIRT content on mobile, all you have to do is to install these apps and add subscription to your existing BIRT reports or reportlet (part of the BIRT report) in BIRT iServer as you see in this video. This will make your BIRT content available on the mobile device without requiring you to tweak the original BIRT design for mobile layout. While subscribing to BIRT content, you can also define report parameters if any and choose default settings for portrait or landscape form. The mobile viewer lets you browse most recent version of all available subscriptions, change report parameters and supports standard "pinch and zoom" controls.

You can download free evaluation copy of BIRT iServer here. BIRT Mobile apps are free and can be downloaded from iTunes and Andorid marketplace.

Make your dashboards more productive for your users

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:48:00 +0000

A typical BI user logs into the system to take a look at key performance indicators (KPIs) , do quick data analysis and make decisions based on the findings. A dashboard comes in handy for this purpose since it allows for grouping these KPIs together on a single (web) page. BIRT 360 already allows the users to create and manage (see how) many such dashboards and now you can even define default dashboard so that they can get started quickly and be productive from the first time they login. This enhancement is available in the latest release (Version 11 SP3) of BIRT iServer. Here is a video tutorial of how an administrator can setup a default dashboard for a new user.

This new release introduces more than 40 major enhancements including DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server support for encyclopedia metadata, the ability to publish content to BIRT OnDemand using BIRT Designer Professional and new mobile support options. You can download and play with free evaluation copies of BIRT Designer Pro and BIRT iServer here.

Create interactive Salesforce dashboards with BIRT

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Are you still pulling your Salesforce data in Excel to do analysis? Now there is a more efficient way to visualize your SFDC data using rich interactive dashboards. Actuate's new Dashboard pack for Salesforce comes with prepackaged sales and pipeline dashboards along with several BIRT reports and gadgets.

The setup utility quickly uploads the necessary files to your on-premise BIRT iServer and you can start working with it right after. Here is a short video that goes over installation and gives a glimpse of what you can expect to see after you set it up.

These dashboards and gadgets are driven by a sample BIRT data object as a data source that could easily be replaced with your own data objects. This can be done by editing datadesign files to provide your SFDC credentials and making necessary SQL modifications to adapt the data set to your SFDC data model. These datadesign files can then be scheduled to generate BIRT Objects at regular intervals within your BIRT iServer environment. The datadesign files and reports can be edited using BIRT Designer Pro, which supports all the features of open source Eclipse BIRT Designer and is compatible with reports developed with it. You can download and install free evaluation copies of BIRT Designer Pro and BIRT iServer from here.

Cut that waiting time

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:48:00 +0000

A typical report generation cycle involves fetching data from the data source, perform sorting, filtering and grouping based on report design logic before the report is rendered. This data processing can be quite resource intensive and for a large data sets might take a long time causing delays in making report available for viewing.
Actuate BIRT Viewer solves this issue by pushing down data operations to the database layer and starts rendering the report pages while is data is still being fetched. This feature is called Progressive Viewing and allows you to view first and consecutive pages while the report is still being rendered as opposed to waiting for all pages to be generated before a page can be viewed. In the latest release (11 sp2) this feature has been enhanced to decrease response time even further by allowing report design to specify if the data is already sorted. (See Video)

A value of false means that BIRT engine will use the sort order of the incoming data and will not attempt to re-sort based on the group keys defined for the table. This helps minimize data processing and results in faster report generation.
The enhanced Progressive Viewing feature works with all out-of-box Actuate BIRT data source types as well as custom data source types based on the ODA (Open Data Framework)

Download your free evaluation version of BIRT iServer and give it a try.

Are you up for the challenge?

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:35:00 +0000

If you have extended BIRT in the past or are thinking of creating a new Data Access Adapter, adding a new Output format, Report Item or a Chart type, now would be a perfect time to cash-in your good work for a 32 GB iPad 2. Actuate announced a new worldwide contest to all BIRT developers that starts today and runs till October 15, 2011. The challenge is to take advantage of Eclipse BIRT open platform and create extensions to address even wider spectrum of applications possible with BIRT. Contest rules, details and some suggestions can be found here. I look forward to seeing some great contributions!

BIRT in Enterprise Content Management

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 23:09:00 +0000

Earlier this month Nuxeo conducted a webinar to introduce how they are using BIRT to address some common and emerging challenges in the ECM space. I was invited to this conference as well and had a chance to demo some interesting dashboard visualizations possible with BIRT and Actuate technology. You can view the recording here.

Leverage non-BIRT content in BIRT 360 Dashboard

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:34:00 +0000

BIRT 360 works great to show data visualizations as interactive charts, graphs, tables as well as any BIRT content. But did you know that you can also use it to display your existing (non BIRT) content in a gadget? If your content is available through a URL link you could use it to display it in a HTML 360 gadget. The HTML gadget also allows for embedding HTML, CSS and Javascript content directly into it.
Here is a short video that demonstrates how you can display an e.Report in BIRT 360 dashboard gadget. It uses both URL and embedded HTML approaches to showcase the capability of the gadget. The following devshare article provides more details on how to formulate URL's for these approaches.

Like every other BIRT 360 gadget you can customize it for auto refresh, change dimensions, show/hide scroll bar, show/hide border and header. Furthermore, gadgets can link to each other so that information from one gadget can change the information displayed in another gadget (see my previous blog post). This brings interactive experience to an otherwise static content.
BIRT 360 is available as an option within BIRT iServer. Download your free evaluation copy of BIRT iServer and give it a try.

Link-up BIRT reports in your dashboard

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:14:00 +0000

BIRT 360 lets you link up your gadgets in the dashboard, so any changes you make to one gadget would change information displayed in other gadgets. Dashboard gadgets are based on a publisher/subscriber model, so a data selector gadget publishes the data to its subscriber gadgets when a user changes a value on the gadget, such as country selection in a list would update the sales by region chart. See this live example
A data publisher gadget can also be a subscriber at the same time which means this concept could be easily extended to create a cascading effect. For example, selecting a country would change the list of states available in a different gadget and selecting a state there would update the list of cities in a third gadget, and all of these gadgets together can link to a regional sales report.
Data in these selector gadgets can either come from either a BIRT Data Object (see my earlier blog on BIRT data object) or it could be derived from a BIRT report. When a BIRT report is added to a dashboard, the system has built-in smarts to figure out if the report has parameters, and gives you the option to present those parameters as a part of the report gadget OR in a separate data selector gadget that you could reuse to link additional gadgets.

Linking gadgets is easy and involves matching the published data field from the data selection gadget to a data field in the data visualization gadget, see how.
Gadgets on a dashboard that link to the same data object are automatically linked when a user adds a new gadget to the dashboard. Other gadgets such as imported gadgets or HTML gadgets can also link to data selection gadgets. The dashboard designer must add Javascript to these gadgets to receive and process values and events that they receive.
BIRT 360 is available as a option within BIRT iServer. Download your free evaluation copy of BIRT iServer and give it a try.

Supercharge your BIRT development!

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:26:00 +0000

Did you know that you can enhance visual appeal in your BIRT reports with flash charts and gadgets using a design environment that is very similar to the Eclipse BIRT Designer? The same designer gives access to more data sources with support for meta data, data objects and lets you merge data in new ways. It helps ease your security concerns with built in features like Access Control List that helps restrict user access to report data. When finished with development, it makes publishing your reports a breeze with a single button click. This simple but yet powerful designer supports all the features of Eclipse BIRT Designer and is compatible with reports developed with it. See this short videos to see more value-add features of Actuate BIRT Designer Professional OR download an evaluation copy and take it on a test drive.

BIRT iServer new install-free download

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:11:00 +0000

Like to try out new BIRT iServer but don't necessarily want to install just yet? Starting with version 11 sp1, you have the option to download BIRT iServer Evaluation Version as a zip file and start the server from a command line after unzipping the package to a convenient location.
The start up script automatically determines the path settings, sets up the pre-requisite components , create storage repository and optionally uploads sample reports. It then opens up a new command prompt window that serves as a console from which the server can be shut down and restarted. When you are finished with evaluation you can simply delete the folder to wipe your system clean.
The zip installer uses JDK that is already installed on your system and hence results in a smaller download size. Also since there is no installation involved, this approach allows for easy creation of stateless image for cloud deployment. Download this all new zip package and explore BIRT iServer platform for deploying, managing, securing, scheduling, running and distributing BIRT documents.

Ashwini Verma

Create data cache and use it in your BIRT Reports

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:31:00 +0000

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

New Demo Environment is now live!

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:22:00 +0000

The demo environment features Actuate BIRT iServer that helps deploy, manage and distribute BIRT documents. In this demo environment you can try out a number of product features like running, browsing, viewing and scheduling reports. In addition you can also try out dashboards, interactive and ad-hoc capabilities of Interactive Viewer and BIRT Sudio. As I had mentioned in my last blog, in the last few weeks we have made several enhancements to this environment. Here is a summary of some of these changes:

Redesigned landing page - The new landing page has a collection of examples that highlights specific product features along with links to download resources. The landing page can be accessed here: Landing Page
Version upgrade - BIRT iServer has been upgraded to Actuate version 11. With this the end user interface (Information Console) also gets a facelift that can be accessed here: Demo Environment
Actuate 11 Demo Pack Examples - A new folder ("Actuate 11 Demo Pack") has been added to /Public folder that you can browse and run examples from within Information Console.
Personal workspace on BIRT iServer - You'll have you own personal workspace on BIRT iServer. To claim this workspace and start using demo environment please log in to your BIRT Exchange account. If you don’t have an account, start by registering on BIRT Exchange, its completely free!

Ashwini Verma

Live demo environment overhaul

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:29:00 +0000

If you haven't already noticed the live demo server has been upgraded to the latest version of Actuate (version 11). This release makes an important milestone for Actuate since it comes with so many new features, I have talked about some of these in my previous blogs. In the coming days we will be making changes to the live demo environment landing page area to make these features easily discoverable with direct links to specific examples and features. Stay tuned for these changes and do let us know your feedback. The demo server and landing pages can be accessed through the following links:
Demo Server
Landing Page

Ashwini Verma

Make your data analysis simpler and accurate with BIRT Analyzer

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:46:00 +0000

Typical data analysis task involves creating complex queries to sort, filter & aggregate data and requires a good knowledge of SQL and databases. The process gets even more challenging if the data source itself is unstructured (like flat files or application objects) and needs to be merged with other data sources. We have all been victims of copying and pasting of data to other tools such as excel to perform data analysis.
BIRT has already made the task of gathering and merging data from disparate data source quite simple. And now starting with version 11, Actuate has launched a new web based OLAP tool called "BIRT Analyzer" that makes data analysis super easy by enabling you to slice and dice the data within a web browser environment without requiring any technical know-how of underlying data technologies.
The web interface for analysis comes in a couple of different ways. You can analyze the data in a contextual manner by launching into analysis from within a BIRT document or a dashboard gadget (See Video). Or you could use data sets or cubes modeled in a BIRT Object to analyze data in a purely ad-hoc fashion (See Video).
The infrastructure allows you to share your analysis results with other users and also link it to real time operational data for a complete 360 degree view of information. The BIRT engine that drives this is available for both 32 bit and 64 bit architecture. Since 64 bit mode has access to larger memory address space, it allows loading of data sets in memory and facilitates simultaneous in-memory analytics for a large number of users.

BIRT Analyzer differentiates itself from other popular analytics products through an architecture that does not require a data warehouse but yet will work with a warehouse if you already have one set up.
Download an evaluation version of BIRT Analyzer to test drive how you can equip yourself with this powerful capability to answer a wide range of questions without having specialized analysis skill set.

Ashwini Verma

Build your own dashboards with BIRT and Google gadgets

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:57:00 +0000

In version 11 Actuate has introduced a new dashboard application (called BIRT 360) that enables you to create your own dashboards without requiring IT intervention. This application is built as an extension to end user browser application (called Information Console) for BIRT Server and is based on the popular Google gadget framework. This allows third party Google Gadgets to be used with BIRT repots to create visually rich mashups.
Depending on the type of data and level of user interaction you want to provide, these dashboards could be operational or analytical. Operational dashboards are typically suitable for continuous monitoring of KPI's and supports interaction and drill down on individual KPI to answer any specific business question.

Analytic dashboards are suitable for visual data exploration combining a set of filter and slicer gadgets with a set of KPI's that you could use to uncover trends and perform root cause analysis.

Both type of dashboards enables you to create visually rich, dynamic dashboard using a simple web browser interface. Here is a summary of some of the key features offered in the dashboard along with a quick video for each:

Creating and sharing dashboards - The dashboard frame allows you to use predefined dashboards, create your own dashboards and share with other users. See Video
Create and sharing BIRT Gadgets - You can build new gadgets and add to the library so that they can be discovered and consumed by other users of the system. See Video
Using data visualization gadget - These gadgets allows you to visualize your data as charts, gauges, tables and crosstab. See Video
Data selection gadgets - These gadgets let you source input parameter data from BIRT Objects and present it in the form of lists, combo box, check box, radio button, slider, calendar etc. You can have other gadgets to update information based on selections made in these gadgets. See Video
Parameter gadget - This gadget displays parameter as a new selector gadget and is derived directly from the parameters defined in BIRT report. See Video
Import third party gadgets - BIRT 360 is a browser based zero foot print application based on the popular Google Gadget framework that enables it to leverage third party Google Gadgets to create mashup applications. See Video
Mashup gadgets - You can link gadgets in the dashboard with other gadgets and create compelling visualizations. See Video
Interact with a gadget - You can maximize the gadget to interactively analyze and modify BIRT reports within the browser environment. See Video

Download a free evaluation copy of Actuate 11 and get a 360 degree view of your data in dashboard.

Ashwini Verma