BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Last week in the Forums: Forcing Column Page Breaks in a Crosstab, Changing Dates to GMT, and more...

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 forum traffic is starting to pick up again. Many great questions and answers were posted. As always, thanks to those users who help answer questions! It is a great help to the community!

The unanswered topic for last week is about forcing a page break in a crosstab. The poster has a crosstab with several weeks of data. If they have 17 days in their range, they want to be able to show 3 crosstabs. The first two with 7 days each and the last with 3 days. If anyone has a good solution or suggestion for this, please post in the forum thread.

The next topic for this week is about converting dateTime fields to GMT. The poster wanted to be able to display their dateTime values in their report in GMT. The server is in CST. The easiest way, if the date just needs to be displayed this way is to use the .toGMTString() function. Another option could be to add or subtract hours from your date depending on the offset.

The last issue for this week is about invalid dates in the dataSet. The poster was having an issue when invalid dates are in their dataSet. For example, if a date is entered as 2/10/20122, on accident, the large year value would overflow the date field and would return them a large integer, rather than a date. This large integer is actually the number of days from the "zero" date in their system. So, the way to get this back to a date in BIRT is to take this number plus the number of days from the java default "zero" date to whatever your system's default date is, and use it in the new Date() function as the days parameter. This will recreate the incorrectly entered date so it can be displayed and the user can tell what happened, rather than just seeing a large integer.

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.