BIRT Report Designers

Features: Report Layout and User Experience

BIRT Report Designers produce rich interactive and navigable reports with the formatting, graphic, and conditional display options to meet complex requirements. The commercial versions of the BIRT Report Designers also support the design of reports with Flash content.

Many Report Types

• Lists, Grouped Lists, Charts, Crosstabs, Dashboards, Letters and Documents
• Top and Bottom Reports - determines report contents based on absolute rankings or percentages
• Compound Reports - combines different report types in one report, such as crosstabs and lists.

Data Formulas and Display Options

BIRT Report Designers provide a variety of functions to perform on data and to determine how it is displayed.

• Sorting, grouping, filtering
• Aggregates - sum, running sum, look-ahead aggregates
• Functions - average, minimum, maximum, count, count distinct, and many more
• Crosstab Hierarchy Creation - creates date and time hierarchy for crosstab reports automatically

Images, Graphs and Charts

Interactive charts, graphs and images are supported by the BIRT Report Designers.

• Grids and Tables
• Images - static, dynamic from a database, from URLs, and conditional.
• Charts - bar, line, pie, scatter, stock, meter, 3D, area, bubble, difference, Gantt, tube, cone and pyramid.
• Multiple Chart Overlays - displays charts on top of each other to compare, contrast and analyze
• Clickable Charts - allows the triggering of custom actions from within a chart
• Granular Chart Element Control - backgrounds, axes, series, and legends including series-specific features such as pie slice explosion and curve fitting.

Navigation

Reports designed with the BIRT Report Designers are interactive, with links between reports, within reports and to external resources.

• Dynamic Hyperlinks - links between bookmarks within a report, other reports, or external resources.
• Table of Contents - links from the Table of Contents to report areas.

Parameterization

BIRT Report Designers create reports whose data, format and behavior can be determined by parameters provided by other programs and end users.

• User Input Parameters - allows end users to input parameters.
• Programmatic Parameters - passes parameters via a program.
• Cascading Parameters - allows parameters to be specified hierarchically.
• Behavior Parameters - allows parameters to control all aspects of report behavior.

Formatting

BIRT Report Designers produce reports that can be viewed in popular report formats, are consistent across print or online media, and can be dynamically and conditionally formatted.

• Multiple Formats - paginated HTML, DHTML PDF, CSV, XLS, DOC, PPT and Postscript.
• Dynamic formatting - expands size of report items to fit content.
• WYSIWYG printing and online formats - delivers consistent reports across print and online media.
• Conditional formatting and visibility - determines report formats and elements using business logic.

Localization

A variety of languages, date formats and cultural standards are supported by the BIRT Report Designers.

• Text - translates copy based on user's language.
• Date and Time - changes data and time formats to conform to language convention.
• Unicode support - translates reports for any language (except right-to-left languages).

Language Packs

The BIRT Report Designers work with the Eclipse Language Packs that translate the designers into the variety of languages. These are included with the Actuate BIRT Report Designers and are available for download from eclipse.org for the Eclipse BIRT Report Designers.

• NLpack1 - contains support for German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
• NLpack2 - contains support for Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Russian.
• NLpack2a - contains support for Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish and Turkish.
• NLpackBidi - contains support for Arabic and Hebrew (note that Hebrew is only for Eclipse runtime, GEF runtime and EMF runtime).

Features Overview Next: Flash Visualizations