DismissHome 
Products BIRT Designers BIRT Designers Features
Extensible and Flexible Data Access and Handling
Actuate offers two report designers that offer features in addition to those in the Eclipse Designers. (For a complete list of standard features click here.
BIRT Designer Pro is a designer with additional features that works within the Eclipse IDE. If desired, the Eclipse Workbench Plug-in can add the functionality of the Eclipse IDE such as creating and manipulating Eclipse projects, working with source code control, and invoking other tools such as Java development tools. JavaScript, Java and Eclipse-like IDE capabilities can be used to further control report layout, data access, data transformation and report rendering.
BIRT Designer Pro is available through a standalone Windows installer or as a plug-in to
your existing Eclipse IDE.
BIRT Designer is a designer with additional features from Actuate that works outside the Eclipse IDE. It is for report developers who want a stand-alone report designer. JavaScript can be used to custom report functionality, behavior and business logic without compiling.
Extensible and Flexible Data Access and Handling
BIRT Designers extend the data source access options and enhance the way BIRT reports handle data.
Additional Data Source Support
BIRT Designers come with support for additional data sources:
- Built-in data drivers - MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Informix, MySQL.
- BIRT Report as a Data Source – one report can use another as a data source
Metadata Layer
BIRT Designers can work with the metadata layer that provides views of data consolidated from multiple data sources - described in plain business language.
- BIRT Designer Pro comes with the BIRT Information Designer to create the metadata layer.
- BIRT Information Designer is used to specify the objects of the metadata layer and to label them.
- BIRT Designer Pro, BIRT Designer and BIRT Studio can develop reports that use the metadata layer.
User and Role-based security within a report
BIRT Designers can work with BIRT Page Level Security for iServer Express product. This product offers the ability to determine which pages of a BIRT Report are available to a user without generating multiple documents. Page Level Security allows a single piece of content to be generated and deployed that addresses the secure information distribution needs of many users.
