BIRT-ing Out Loud

I just proposed a talk for the EclipseCon developer conference taking place in Santa Clara, California on March 23rd-26th, 2009.  While there are several long talks already submitted for consideration, I was told by the organizers that they need more 10 minute short talks on BIRT.  In particular, they are looking for BIRT customer stories. deployment experiences, any extensions or plug-ins you have built for BIRT, and any other BIRT usage stories would be great.

There is still time to submit a session proposal, but you only have a few more days left as the Call for Participation ends on Monday, November 24th.

Tomorrow, November 19th, Actuate and IBM are co-presenting an online webinar on working with BIRT reports with IBM ClearQuest and I am doing the demo portion.  I plan to show BIRT reports inside the ClearQuest client, the ability to schedule and distribute those reports in the Actuate iServer Express, and interact with the reports using the Interactive Viewer.  There is still time to register if you want to attend.

Tomorrow, November 14th, we will be hosting a webinar on BIRT Exchange showing how to use the e.Spreadsheet Engine APIs to integrate Excel and Java.  We will discuss how simple it is to read existing Excel files into Java, write Excel files from Java, and leverage Excel formula calculations in Java.  New with Version 10 is that some of the Excel read/write functionality will be free.  The webinar is a brisk 30 minutes so plan to show up 5-10 minutes early so you don’t miss anything.

Using the e.Spreadsheet Engine APIs in Java
Nov 14, 2008 - 09:00 am PST- 30 minutes

The webinar will be recorded and available from the same link for those of you reading this post after November 14th.

Come see us at Eclipse Summit Europe next week (November 19th-20th) to learn more about BIRT and open source product strategies. 

On Wednesday, Paul Clenahan will be presenting a session titled Open Source As Part of a Successful Product Strategy exploring differenct approaches to using open source with your product strategy.

And on Thursday, Jason Weathersby will be presenting Whats New With BIRT 2.3 explaining the BIRT project with a focus on the latest features.

If you’re going to be near Ludwigsburg, Germany next week, then there is still time to sign up.

I was approved to talk at the WJAX developer conference in Munich Germany this week.  For those of you attending this conference, I’ll be teaching the session titled Advanced BIRT Report Customization on Wednesday, November 6th, at 830am.  This session will focus on BIRT report scripting, report reuse with libraries and templates, and internationalization of report content.  For those of you not attending the conference I’ll post the slides and examples on BIRT Exchange as soon as the conference is over.

While much of BIRT Exchange talks about the BIRT reporting technology, there is another technology represented here around the e.Spreadsheet product line.  One of these products, the e.Spreadsheet Designer, allows you to author rich spreadsheet reports that you can deliver from your applications.  While this designer is quite feature-rich, providing working charts, real formulas, outlining, and multiple worksheets, there are times you may want to extend this designer even further.

This Friday, October 31st, at 9am PST, Parag Sanghavi from Actuate Support will treat us with a few tricks on how to extend the e.Spreadsheet Designer with Java Callback Classes allowing the designer to handle any spreadsheet reporting requirement thrown at it.  More information on this webinar and sign up information is at the link below.

Working with e.Spreadsheet Callback Classes
Oct 31, 2008 - 09:00 am

This Friday, October 17th, Mark Gamble from Actuate Corporation will demonstrate the Flash map capability available soon with the Actuate BIRT Designer.  This is short, 30 minute, webinar that is part of the BIRT Exchange developer webinar series.

More information and registration can be found at the link below.

Incorporating Flash-based Geospatial Visualizations into BIRT Reports
Oct 17, 2008 - 09:00 am

An archive of this webinar will be available from the same link a few days after the webinar is completed. 

If you are going to be in the Washington, D.C. area between October 28th and 30th, then stop by and see us at the EclipseWorld 2008 Developer Conference. In the Exhibit Hall, We will be demonstrating the BIRT product line from Actuate showing how to get security, scheduling, and enhanced end-user interactivity for your existing BIRT reports.

Register for an Exhibit Hall pass by this Friday, October 17th, and the pass is FREE!

For those of you attending the conference, on Tuesday I will be assisting Wayne Beaton with the BIRT portion of his tutorial titled Java Development With Ganymede… and on Wednesday, Jason Weathersby will be presenting a session titled Business Intelligence Meets Java which is an Introduction to BIRT 2.3 reporting.

When I’m not presenting a session, I will be spending my time at the BIRT Exchange booth and look forward to hearing about what you’ve done with BIRT.

Register for EclipseWorld and get more information at http://www.eclipseworld.net/.

I’ve seen several questions lately on how to use the BIRT CSV Emitter example that is explained in the Integrating and Extending BIRT book. While the book goes into great detail explaining what each file does and even how to build the entire example yourself, my blog post will just give the basic steps necessary to use the example. The steps below assume you have an Eclipse IDE and have also downloaded the BIRT Runtime engine.

First we need to download the example CSV emitter project and the associated classes used to run the example.  You can find the files at this link. You will need both org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.csv.zip and ExecuteCSVReport.zip from the Report rendering section. 

Next, we need to import the files into Eclipse. 

1. From the Eclipse IDE, select Import from the File menu and then select Existing Projects into Workspace under General and press Next.
2. Select org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.csv.zip as the archive file and then make sure the project displayed is checked before pressing Finish.
3. Repeat these steps to import the project from ExecuteCSVReport.zip. Don’t worry about any reference errors in the project at this time… we’ll correct those later.

Now that our projects are imported, we need to export the CSV emitter plug-in. 

1. Right-click on the org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.csv project and select Export.
2. Choose Deployable plug-ins and fragments from the Plug-In Development choices and press Next.
3. Make sure your plug-in is selected and then choose your ReportEngine directory that is part of your BIRT Runtime Engine download.

Now that our new plug-in is exported, we need to test it.  The ExecuteCSVReport project contains an example report and code we can use for this test but first we need to fix the project references to point to our own BIRT Runtime Engine files.

1. Right-click the ExecuteCSVReport project and select Properties.
2. Select Java Build Path and then Libraries
3. Highlight all the JAR files that indicate they are missing and press the Remove button.
4. Press the Add External JARs button and select all the files from your ReportEngine/lib directory.
5. Press the Add External JARs button again and this time select the new plug in you just created.  If you accepted the defaults from the export step above, then this should be in the ReportEngine/plugins directory in a file called org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.csv_1.0.0.jar.

Now that our project references are corrected, we need to correct one more reference in our ExecuteReport.java file that points to the BIRT Runtime Engine.

1. Double-click ExecuteReport.java to open this file in the editor.
2. Change the setEngineHome line to point to your ReportEngine directory like the example shows below.

config.setEngineHome( “C:/work/eclipse/BIRT_230/birt-runtime-2_3_0/ReportEngine” )

Once the ExecuteReport.java file is saved we can run the example.

1. Right click on ExecuteReport.java and select Run As | Java Application. You will see a message that says “We are done!!!” in the Console if everything worked correctly.
2. Press F5 on your ExecuteCSVReport project to refresh the files and you should now see a new file called csvReport.csv in the reports folder.

It’s hard to believe the BIRT Exchange community site is already one year old.  Instead of getting presents for it’s first birthday, the folks behind BIRT Exchange were busy giving presents away.  The most active BIRT Exchange users over the past year were contacted recently and asked to choose a gift. 

There were many active users on BIRT Exchange who helped make this site a success so it was difficult to decide who should get gifts.  For this task, we took into consideration the number of forum posts, examples submitted to DevShare, plus comments made and ratings applied to other submissions.  These active members were asked to choose between an Official BIRT Rocks! T-Qualizer shirt and a set of BIRT Books (BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting and Integrating and Extending BIRT)

Some people have not yet chosen their gift, however it is clear that the majority of these members emailed have chosen the BIRT Rocks shirt.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the first year of BIRT Exchange a success.