DismissWhat is BIRT?
BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) is an Eclipse-based, open source data visualization and reporting technology. BIRT gives developers the tools they need to add a variety of rich interactive reports, analytics and dashboards to web and mobile applications.
BIRT consists of designer and deployment technologies. A BIRT design specifies the data sources to access, the data values to display and how the information should be visually presented. Deployment technologies read BIRT design files, query the specified data sources and render the interactive BIRT output in browsers or on mobile devices.
BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you can add to your app server. BIRT also offers a charting engine that lets you add charts to your own application. More Details
Actuate Products for Eclipse BIRT
Need additional capabilities for rapid development, interactive viewing, dashboards, analytics and secure scalable deployment? Find out about the value-added BIRT designer, user experience and server products available from Actuate, the people behind BIRT™, in this comparison chart which lists completely compatible enhancements for your Eclipse BIRT designs. More Details
Anatomy of a BIRT Design
BIRT designs consist of four main parts: data, data transforms, business logic and presentation.
- Data - Databases, web services, and Java objects can supply data to your BIRT report. BIRT provides JDBC, XML, Web Services, and Flat File support, as well as support for using code to access other sources of data. BIRT's use of the Open Data Access (ODA) framework allows anyone to build new UI and runtime support for any kind of tabular data. Further, a single report can include data from any number of data sources. BIRT allows disparate data sources to be combined using inner and outer joins.
- Data Transforms - Reports present data sorted, summarized, filtered and grouped to fit users’ needs. While databases can do some of this work, BIRT must do it for "simple" data sources such as flat files or Java objects. BIRT provides sophisticated operations such as grouping on sums, percentages of overall totals and more.
- Business Logic - Real-world data is seldom perfectly structured for reporting. Many reports require business-specific logic to convert raw data into useful information. If the logic is just for a report, script it using BIRT's JavaScript support. If your application already contains the logic, call in existing Java code.
- Presentation - Once the data is ready, there are options for presenting it to users: tables, charts, text and more. A single data set can appear in multiple ways, and a single report can present data from multiple data sets.
