eSpreadsheet charts -> BIRT charts?

[elliotkatz]

Is there any way to programatically convert charts inside a sod file to BIRT charts?

[rmurphy]

If you simply want to get a chart image out of e.Spreadsheet, you can use the e.Spreadsheet Engine API to pull out the chart as an image. The following wiki page has information about this.

Extracting charts from Excel files - BIRT Wiki - BIRT Exchange

If you are wanting to take the chart in an e.Spreadsheet design and design a new chart in BIRT, you could use the e.Spreadsheet Engine API to understand the make up of the chart. You would then use BIRT's chart API to construct the new chart in BIRT. Keep in mind that you would have to setup all the data sources and data sets and "wire" everything together to get it to work. This would definitely take some time to implement and would not be trivial.

Rob

[elliotkatz]

Thanks, Bob.
Currently, we have built a library which does exactly what you suggest - recreates a BIRT chart by getting the specs from the eSpreadsheet API.
It was quite tedious to create, and there are still quite a few cases which I'm sure we don't handle correctly.

One problem is that the BIRT documentation that I have seen is rather sketchy. One particular problem is determining the meanings of the various chart parameters. Perhaps there is some documentation which I have missed.

The problem with pulling chart images from a spreadsheet is that the images can only be extracted in raster format. These do not scale well to pdf resolution. The lines are jagged (our users are complaining :-))
I noticed that when I used the new functionality of Actuate 10 to create a
pdf file directly from a spreadsheet, I have the same problem. The charts are not "publication quality". Our only option currently is to recreate them as BIRT charts and then to export them as an svg file.

I was hoping that the new version of eSpreadsheet would somehow allow an .svg version of the chart to be extracted, but it appears that the api does not support that.

Is there any chance of having that capability in eSpreadsheet?

Thanks
Elliot

[bkillen]

Elliot,

I know Rob and JT are working up a technical answer to your last question about SVG, i'll let them handle that issue. Can you tell me, from a higher level, your usage scenario? Expand on how you are trying to use BiRT and e.Spreadsheet together. I just want to understand if there is something we could do to better facilitate your needs. Are you ultimately going to PDF?

Brian Killen
VP Engineering - Spreadsheet Products

[RussW]

Also, why do you consider the eSS charts to not be 'publication' quality? Can you describe your problems and post an example?

[rmurphy]

Elliot,
There is an example of getting an SVG image from an XLS file in the following DevShare post.

e.Spreadsheet Chart as SVG - Designs & Code - BIRT Exchange

This could also be done from an e.Spreadsheet report design file (.sod).

Rob