BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> BIRT Rocks!

A typical BIRT report development process involves defining data sources, data sets/cubes and then using these data sets to create the required visualization. When the report is executed BIRT engine takes these definitions and fetches the data and renders it. One way to reuse these data definitions is to define them in a BIRT template or library and import it in your report development.

Starting with version 11 of Actuate, BIRT introduced a new construct that allows creation of data models as one or more flat /muti-dimensional structures from multiple and disparate data sources. This new data model referred to as "BIRT Data Objects" can be consumed by BIRT as a data source.



A BIRT Data Object shares the same "report design" perspective in BIRT Designer Professional and uses the similar concept of data sources, data sets and cubes that you are already familiar with. See Video


BIRT Data Object design files have the file extension "datadesign" (e.g. MyDataObject.datadesign) and once deployed in the iServer environment it can be scheduled to run in the background to generate highly compressed and optimized data object(e.g. MyDataObject.data) that contains a snapshot of sourced data at the time it was executed. This enables you to access data without spending time and resources data centralization activities. BIRT Data Objects can leverage a data warehouse or any data type that you have access to in BIRT. Inside a BIRT Object you can merge/join disparate data sets , apply data transformation and formatting routines and create computed columns based on your business logic.

BIRT Data Objects allows you to provide linking of a data set columns to other local or remote content allowing drilldown capability to operational dataset. For example, a link can be created from a “CustomerNumber” column of a dataset column to a “Customer Details” report.


If a BIRT Data Object contains multiple cubes you can share one or more dimensions across these cubes to facilitate simultaneous analysis for disparate measures along common dimensions. For example you can create a dashboard with “Sales revenue” and “Customer loyalty” as KPIs and then drill-down into these measures using the common “Geography” dimension.


BIRT Data Objects takes full advantage of 64 bit environment and avails of the increased memory address space for faster access and highly responsive ad-hoc queries and data analysis. Actuate’s in-memory architecture optimizes memory in a number of ways such as stripping data of redundancies, managing in-memory objects, sharing objects loaded into memory across a number of users and applications and providing support for 32-bit platform through intelligent disk-based caching

BIRT Data Objects models page level security (PLS) and gives you flexibility to secure the entire data object itself or rows & columns in data set and in case of cubes dimensions, measures & members.

The security comes in the form of Access Control Lists (ACL's) and lets you specify users/roles that can have access rights to the data. This eliminates the need to create multiple data objects to cater to the varying needs of consumers of this data.
All these features provides the foundation for supporting a wide spectrum of ad hoc query and reporting tools such as BIRT Studio, BIRT 360 and BIRT Data Analyzer that I will be talking about in upcoming blogs. Meanwhile you can download a free trial copy of Actuate version 11 products from here.

Ashwini Verma

Ever wished for a BIRT input parameter with flexibility to define a conditional clause? Actuate 11 BIRT now supports dynamic parameters that allows you to define condition clause along with parameter values.

This enables you to analyze the same BIRT report without modifying the design. For example, consider a simple customer listing table that shows customer information such as "Name", "Address", "Industry", "Country", "City", "Revenue" etc. Creating a dynamic filter on “Country” field will prompt you to enter the “Country” value along with the condition that you would like to associate with the values you choose. Change the condition to "Not in" to see data where countries are not UK or Sweden. See Video

The condition clause can be applied to data sets or report items e.g. tables, charts. The BIRT engine automatically updates the query for performance by pushing the conditions down to the database. Actuate BIRT Designer allows you to even see query execution profile for each report item that uses dynamic filter.

To create a dynamic parameters as a filter to a report item or the dataset, select the control and go to the filter tab:

You can also create a generic dynamic filter parameters in the data explorer view and apply them to report items:

Discover this new feature in the latest release of BIRT in Actuate 11, you can download an evaluation copy of BIRT designer professional from here.

Ashwini Verma

If PDF output is one of the output formats that you use BIRT to generate you will be delighted with the new PDF emitter capabilities that is available with version 11 of Actuate BIRT. The emitter has been completely rewritten to give you a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) design experience. What this means to you as a report developer is that your PDF report layout will be consistent with the web layout and your pagination scheme will be maintained across various formats without any additional design effort. The layout of the output is also consistent with the layout in the design pane of BIRT designer. See Video
With flexible export options to Embed fonts, Substitute fonts and Chart DPI settings you can optimize PDF output as per your needs.

Vector graphics option enables your to generate high fidelity images when an SVG image is present in the BIRT design or if you choose to generate a chart in SVG format. Overall these settings can influence fonts used in the output, PDF file size and printout quality. See Video
The new emitter can even display native flash content in PDF. All the functionality and interactivity is preserved in the PDF output providing a complete web experience for flash objects in the PDF output. See Video

Download and try the above features for yourself in the new Actuate BIRT Designer Professional (version 11).

Ashwini Verma

Actuate BIRT in version 11 has a new Excel emitter that creates analysis ready live Excel spreadsheets. I have created a few videos to highlight some of these enhancements: 

Live Excel Formulas – BIRT exports calculated fields and aggregations as Excel formula and functions that enables users to perform “what-if” analysis within spreadsheet. Watch video
Editable Charts – BIRT charts are now converted to live Excel charts with an associated data sheet containing the underlying data that could be edited to see how data changes reflects back in the chart. Watch video 
Pivot Tables – BIRT crosstabs are exported as pivot tables containing the underlying data for further analysis. These pivot tables can be used to analyze the data based on different dimensions or to perform what-if analysis by altering the underlying data sheet. Watch Video 
Images – The enhanced Excel emitter also adds support for images in the Excel output. Watch Video 
Export Objects – Export the entire BIRT output to Excel or choose a specific table, chart or crosstab to export. Watch Video
Multiple Worksheets - A simple check box control enables creation of multiple worksheets. Watch Video
To download the Actuate 11 milestone builds visit http://www.birt-exch...iki/Actuate_11/

BIRT does not impose any restrictions on the data size. This could mean BIRT visualizations based on large data sets could be running for a long time using up your computing resources during the busy hours of the day. The other requirement I often come across is to run reports on a recurring basis with the latest data and notify a set of users or even email them a copy of the report output in the desired format(e.g. a weekly sales report). Combine the above end user requirements with the real world business need to trigger the report generation based on certain system events or other business processes along with the ability to monitor/manage the scheduled jobs and you could end up with a fairly complex scheduling system. Fortunately iServer (Express) addresses these complex requirements with a simple user interface.

Information Console is the end-user interface to iServer(Express). It offers a very simple yet rich web interface that meets majority of the end-user needs around calendar based scheduling, and also lets them pre-define any input parameters to the report if any along with the output location, format and notify and share with other users.


Management Console is another web interface that offers a more granular control over scheduling aspects (calendar and event based) in iServer (Express).


It allows for a more advanced calendar schedule and event settings.


If you create a job that uses an event based criteria and a calendar schedule, the job runs when both conditions occur. The systems accept three kinds of events:

• File Event - Use the file/folder presence as a condition for running a job.
  
• Job Event - Specify completion of a job as a criterion for running a scheduled job.
  
• Custom Event - With custom event you can specify a web service that iServer(Express) monitors and run the jobs when the web service returns a signal to the web service. The following wiki article discusses Custom Event web service in further detail:
  http://www.birt-exch...e_-_Report_Jobs

You can obtain information about scheduled jobs or completed jobs using Management Console.


iServer(Express) groups job processing into five phases:

• Scheduled
  
• Waiting for Event
  
• Pending
  
• Running
  
• Completed

Based on the privileges, individual users and administrators can manage jobs at each and every phase.
Download your own evaluation copy of iServer (Express) and try these features yourself:
http://www.birt-exch...press/features/