Posts Tagged ‘birt’
The technique for alternate row styling described in a previous post is applicable for tables with detail rows (a detail row in a table corresponds to a row in the bound data set). However, it is often the case that the table does not contain any detail rows at all and instead displays only aggregated […]
It is fairly straightforward to read a value stored in a cookie. This can have many uses, for example if the landing page for your reporting application needs to pass some values to your reports but you don’t want them visible in the URL. The code sample below retrieves the value of a cookie and […]
In a previous post we described how to set the series palette dynamically for a pie chart. A slightly different approach is required for area charts. Let’s recap on the problem at hand: in what is a fairly common scenario, one chooses the palette colours to match with particular category values. For example, in the […]
BIRT series palette is static by default, meaning colours are applied in the specified order without being tied to the actual category values. This is ok in most cases, however consider the following scenario. In our data we expect three category values, “1-Low”, “2-Mid” and “3-High” and the chart series palette has been set to […]
It is possible to set the title of a chart dynamically, for example based on parameter values, using a little bit of scripting. The example below assumes that two parameters are defined (“Year” and “Month” with values such as “2010” and “Jan”). function beforeGeneration( chart, icsc ) { var sYear = icsc.getExternalContext().getScriptable().getParameterValue( “Year” ); var […]
Eclipse BIRT comes with Report Viewer, a J2EE application used for generating and displaying reports. Whilst deploying and using the out-of-the-box application on Tomcat is straightforward, there are fairly rich configuration and parametrization options which are non-obvious. The following two documents describe how the viewer works and how to control its behaviour. BIRT Viewer User’s […]
The BIRT chart wizard provides an option to skip missing values in a series and connect them with the series line; however, there is no option to substitute a default value for the missing data. The screenshot below shows a chart where the series value is missing for category value 03-MAR and the “Connect Missing […]
JDBC drivers need to be put in the following location to be available in BIRT Viewer. Putting them into <TOMCAT HOME>/common/lib does not work in BIRT and you will get a “cannot load JDBC driver” error. <TOMCAT HOME>/webapps/birt/WEB-INF/platform/plugins/org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc_2.3.1.v20080827/drivers The Tomcat path and version number will depend on your environment.
In the legend properties for BIRT meter charts (accessed via Format Chart > Chart Area > Legend) there is a Show Value checkbox which controls displaying the series value together with its name. For some reason, in the Entries the dialog the Format control appears to be disabled, and so there is no way to […]
BIRT has a wonderful meter chart type which is very useful for building KPI-based performance dashboards. However, it can be a little tricky to get the visual layout of the chart right. With default settings most of the chart is empty blank space with a relatively small dial in the middle. This is because the […]