BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Michael's BIRT Blog

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. As expected, the forums are starting to slow a little, over the summer, at least for now. That being said, they're slowing down from a state of high traffic, so there are still many posts coming in, each week. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post, this week, is about scroll bars on a chart. The poster has a gantt chart that they want to have vertical scroll bars on. If anyone has done this or has ideas, please post your suggestions in the thread.

The next topic, for this week, is about line height in PDF. This question comes through the forums often enough. When you set the line height in BIRT to a larger value than the text, all outputs show a larger line height. However, when you try to have a smaller line height, the HTML outputs show this, but PDF does not. The reason that some people tried to reduce the line height was because PDF seemed to show extra spacing between lines. This should be solved in BIRT 3.7, as there is a new line height algorithm for 3.7+. So, if you're using an older version and having issues with line spacing, upgrading will be the easiest option. The next option is probably to edit the pdf emitter.

The last topic, for this week, is about passing multiple values to a report through a parameter. The poster had a HTML select form in their report in a HTML text box that they wanted the user to be able to select multiple values from and submit the form and recall the design passing the multiple selections through their parameter. A sample report is included in the thread that does just that. It passes the current values through the parameter and uses them in the query to limit the dataSet. It also sets them as the selected values in the drop down.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. The forums continue to be busy as we push through the last month of the first half of the year. I'm getting closer and closer to catching up on posts I've been working on. Thanks everyone, for your patience. :) As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post from last week is about scripting in crosstabs. The poster has some script to set the format, depending on the value of a field in the crosstab. That is working fine for them. They also have some script where they're checking the value of another field and want to set the colors for the cell. This is not working for them. For more specifics, check out the thread. If you have suggestions or solutions, please post them.

The next topic for this week is about showing different content on the masterpage for different pages of the report. The poster wanted a grid on the first page and a different grid on the second page for printing customer invoices. An example report is provided in the thread that shows a way to achieve this. For it to work, the report must be ran using separate run and render tasks. See the thread for more information on this.

The last topic for this week is about setting the vertical position of a table footer. The poster wanted to know if they could determine the vertical position of the footer so they could push it to the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, I don't know that there's a way to do this, currently. The masterpage footer can be used with page or report variables to put page/report information. Another couple ways would be to add extra footer rows to your table and show/hide them, depending on your count of rows on the page or to use a HTML text box to force the footer down, also depending on your count of rows. Here are a couple devShare posts, showing the last two:

http://www.birt-exch...ting-row-color/

http://www.birt-exch...le-to-fit-page/

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. I'm doing my best to catch up the unanswered posts and the posts I'm working on. I was out a couple days and had the newsletter to get out, so if you know the answer to a post that you see isn't answered, feel free to post. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic, from last week, is about connection profiles. The poster wants to be able to create an editable connection profile for the purpose of editing the parameters for the dataSource for use in many reports. If anyone has experience editing connection profiles in this way, please post your suggestions in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover is about dynamic x-axis chart markers. The poster wanted to be able to create a dynamic marker on their dateTime type x-axis. A couple of examples are in the thread. One shows how to do this with a true dateTime axis and one shows how to do this with a dateTime category axis.

The last topic, for this week, is about getting a border only on the bottom of a group, in a crosstab. The poster wanted to be able to have a border on the bottom of each row grouping, in their crosstab. This would be easy, if they wanted a border on all rows, but with the way a crosstab is formed, it gets harder to put borders on only certain cells. An example is included in the thread that shows how this can be done in script.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.

This blog series takes a look back at the past week in the forums, recalling how active they were and highlights some of the questions asked that seem to frequent the forums or other interesting topics. It's June! Summer is upon us. I fully expect the forums to begin to slow down, sometime this month, as summer is here and there are vacations to be taken. As always, thanks to those users who help answer forum questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered post for this week is about integrating BIRT reports in Vaadin portlet. The poster is wanting to be able to integrate birt reports into their Vaadin portlet. They are new to Vaadin and they can't figure it out. If anyone has done this or has suggestions, please post in the thread!

The next topic, from last week, that I'll cover, is about having a string field as a crosstab measure. The default aggregation performed on a crosstab element is SUM. If you've tried using a string and didn't know where to change this or have ever tried to sum with a string field, before, you know you end up with an error. When you want to use a string, the other thing you need to do is to change the aggregation to FIRST. To do this, double click on the measure in the crosstab wizard and change SUM to FIRST in the drop down. There is an example in the thread that shows this.

The last question, for this week, is about changing the colors of the series in a chart and setting the legend color to match. This is a very common question. I may have covered this in a past edition of LWITF, but it's worth covering again. In the forum thread, you'll see script that can be added to the chart script to change both the series color and the legend block color, to match, based on the series.

Again, this is just a small sample of what went through the forums this past week. For more questions and answers that have been posted, check out the forums. As always, if you have a question, feel free to ask it, and if you see a question you know the answer to or have a similar experience to, feel free to post an answer or comment.