Before your EGL code can create BIRT reports, you must
add support to your project. You need to add support only once for
each project, and you do not need to remove support if you stop using
BIRT reports.
You can add support for BIRT as you create a project. On the second
screen in the New EGL Project wizard, check Show Advanced
Settings, and at the next screen, select the EGL
with BIRT report support check box.
Alternatively, you can add support for an existing project:
- In the Project Explorer view, right-click your EGL project and
then click Properties. The Properties window
opens.
- In the Properties window, click EGL Project Features.
- Under EGL Project Features at the right side of the window, select
the EGL with BIRT report support check box.
If this check box is already selected, leave it selected.
- Click OK.
Also, if you need to reference graphics that are stored in the
BIRT resource folder, click Windows -> Preferences ->Report
Design -> Resource and specify the folder. For additional
details on graphics and BIRT, see "External types in BIRT report-layout
event handler"; in particular, the section on ImageInstance.
Adding support for PDF reports
If you want
to export reports in Portable Document Format (PDF), you have an additional
step after adding support for BIRT reports.
For a General project,
do as follows:
- Download the file iText-1.3.jar from the
following website:http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/itext.
- In the Project Explorer view, right-click your project and then
click Properties.
- In the Properties window, click Java Build Path.
- On the Libraries tab, click Add
External JARs.
- In the JAR Selection window, select the iText-1.3.jar file
that you just downloaded and click Open.
Now
the iText-1.3.jar file is listed under JARs
and class folders on the build path.
- Click OK.
For a Plug-in project, do a series of steps outside of the
Integrated Development Environment:
- Download the file iText-1.3.jar from the
following website:http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/itext.
- Find the product installation location for IBM® shared code and then the plugins directory;
for example:
C:\Program Files\IBM\SDP70Shared\plugins
- In the plugins directory, find the most recent
version of the directory for the plug-in com.lowagie.itext;
for example
com.lowagie.itext_1.3.0.v20070205-1728
As
shown, the name is followed by a version number and timestamp.
- Ensure that a lib directory is within the
directory for the plug-in com.lowagie.itext. If a lib directory
is not there, add it; for example:
com.lowagie.itext_1.3.0.v20070205-1728\lib
- Copy the file iText-1.3.jar into the lib directory.
Setting the build descriptor option birtEngineHome
Before
you can work with BIRT, you need to download BIRT runtime code and
set the
birtEngineHome build descriptor option, but only if
you are working in a General project. Here are the steps:
- Go to http://www.eclipse.org/birt
- Access the runtime code of interest. At this writing, the procedure
is as follows:
- On the left of the page, click Download
- At the next page, go to the More Downloads section and click Recent
Builds Page
- At the next page, go to the Latest Releases section and, in the
Build Name column, click 2_3_0
- At the next page, go to the Report Engine section and click birt-runtime-2.3.0.zip
- At the next page, click a mirror location and follow the displayed
instructions to download the code
Note: EGL supports only the following versions of BIRT:
Table 1. EGL and BIRT version compatibility| EGL version |
BIRT version |
| 7.5 |
2.3.0 |
| 8.0 |
2.6.1 |
- Unzip the downloaded code into a directory of your choice; for
example, C:\birt
- In the project build descriptor, set the birtEngineHome option
to the fully qualified path of the ReportEngine directory;
for example, C:\birt\birt-runtime-2_3_0\ReportEngine
Accessing the non-EGL jar files needed at deployment
time
To deploy code that runs a BIRT report, ensure that
you deploy a set of jar files that are found in the ReportEngine\lib subdirectory
of the directory that contains the BIRT runtime code; for example,
in C:\birt\birt-runtime-2_3_0\ReportEngine\lib.
These
jar files are in the subdirectory:
- commons-codec-1.3.jar
- coreapi.jar
- engineapi.jar
- js.jar
- modelapi.jar
- scriptapi.jar
For a description of how to deploy the files, see the Generation
Guide section "Preparing for Deployment".