BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> Last week in the Forums: Accessing Session Variables in BIRT, Adding Crosstab Page Break in Script, 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 traffic in the forums continues to be very high. 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 question for this week is about accessing a session variable from external application in BIRT report. The poster wants to be able to call their BIRT report in a JSP embedded viewer and pass a session variable into BIRT to be used in their where clause. If anyone has an example of this or a description of what needs to be done, please post in the thread.

The next topic I'll cover from last week is about setting a page break in a crosstab using script. The poster wanted to be able to dynamically add a page break in script, based on a parameter selected by the user. Usually you can set the page break interval on a group in the onPrepare method of the crosstab. However, in this case, the dimensions are being edited dynamically in the beforeFactory, so this simple solution didn't work. An example report showing a way to do this is included in the thread.

The last post I'll cover this week is about displaying "no data" when your csv source file is blank. If you're using a csv file as your source and your csv file will always have the header info, this won't happen to you. However, if your csv file is completely empty when there is no data, then you'll get errors if a report element uses the dataSet that tries to access this file. The solution offered in the thread to get around this involves reading in the file in script prior to running the dataSet, so you can drop any elements that might use this data from the report. This avoids any errors. An example can be found in the thread.

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.