BIRT provides two report designers, BIRT Report Designer and BIRT RCP Report Designer. Both designers are reporting systems that integrate with your J2EE-based web application to enable report developers to produce compelling reports in both web and PDF formats. BIRT Report Designer is for report developers who want to use programming or scripting in their report designs. BIRT RCP Report Designer does not support the use of programming or scripting in Java.
Each designer is packaged as an archive (.zip) file and can be downloaded from the Eclipse web site.
The available packages are:
BIRT Report Designer
If you already have installed an Eclipse environment, you can download and install BIRT Report Designer.
BIRT RCP Report Designer
If you have installed a Java environment, you can download and install BIRT RCP Report Designer. This designer is easier to use but does not support programming or scripting in Java.
BIRT Report Designer Full Eclipse Install
If you have an installed Java environment, and you want to be able to program or use JavaScript in your report design, you can download and install BIRT Report Designer Full Eclipse Install. This package contains BIRT Report Designer and all the Eclipse components that you need in one ZIP file.
BIRT Report Designer integrates into an existing Eclipse platform on your computer by providing the report design perspective. BIRT Report Designer also includes the Software Development Kit (SDK) and the components provided in the BIRT Chart Engine, BIRT Demo Database, BIRT Report Engine, and BIRT Samples packages.
You install BIRT Report Designer by downloading an archive (.zip) file from the Eclipse web site and extracting it in your existing Eclipse environment. The following examples use BIRT Release 2.1.
Complete the following procedure to download and install BIRT Report Designer on a Windows or UNIX system.
How to install BIRT Report Designer
Using your browser, navigate to the following URL:
From Download, choose the following build:
Release build 2_1_0
The BIRT Release Build: 2_1_0 page appears.
Choose the Report Designer ZIP file:
birt-report-framework-2_1_0.zip
The Eclipse downloads page appears. This page shows all the sites that provide this download file.
Choose the download site that is closest to your location.
birt-report-framework-2_1_0.zip downloads to your system.
Extract the archive file to the folder that contains your Eclipse directory.
Be certain to extract the archive into the directory that contains the eclipse folder and not into the eclipse folder. For example, if your eclipse folder is located at C:eclipse, extract the archive into C:.
Download and install the auxiliary file that is necessary for PDF creation, as described in the following section.
BIRT Report Designer also requires iText, an open source Java-PDF library that BIRT uses to generate PDF versions of reports. You must install iText after you install BIRT Report Designer.
To test your BIRT Report Designer installation, start Eclipse, then start BIRT Report Designer. BIRT Report Designer is a perspective within Eclipse.
How to test the BIRT Report Designer installation
Start Eclipse.
From the Eclipse window menu, choose Open Perspective→Report Design. If Report Design does not appear in the Open Perspective window, choose Other. A list of perspectives appears. Choose Report Design.
Eclipse displays the BIRT Report Designer perspective.
If the test fails, see “Avoiding cache conflicts after you install a BIRT report designer,” later in this chapter.
If you are new to Eclipse and BIRT, you can download and install this package to start developing and designing BIRT reports immediately. This package includes BIRT Report Designer, an Eclipse environment, and other required components.
In BIRT Release 2.1, the BIRT Report Designer Full Eclipse Install package contains:
Eclipse Platform 3.2
Graphics Editor Framework 3.2
Eclipse Modeling Framework 2.2
BIRT Report Designer 2.1
You install BIRT Report Designer Full Eclipse Install by downloading and extracting an archive (.zip) file. The following examples use BIRT Release 2.1.
Complete the following procedure to download and install BIRT Report Designer and the other necessary components on a Windows or UNIX system.
How to install BIRT Report Designer Full Eclipse Install
Using your browser, navigate to the following URL:
Select the following build:
Release build 2_1_0
The BIRT Release Build: 2_1_0 page appears.
Choose the Report Designer Full Eclipse Install ZIP file:
birt-report-designer-all-in-one-2_1_0.zip
The Eclipse downloads page appears. This page shows all the sites that provide this download file.
Choose the download site that is closest to your location.
birt-report-designer-all-in-one-2_1_0.zip downloads to your system.
Extract the archive file.
Download and install the auxiliary file that is necessary for PDF creation, as described in the following section.
BIRT Report Designer also requires iText, an open source Java-PDF library that BIRT uses to generate PDF versions of reports. You must install iText after you install BIRT Report Designer.
Download itext-1.3.jar from the following URL:
Copy itext-1.3.jar to the following location in your Eclipse installation:
/plugins/com.lowagie.itext_1.3.0/lib
To test your installation, see “Testing the BIRT Report Designer installation,” earlier in this chapter.
BIRT RCP Report Designer is a stand-alone report design application that enables report developers to produce compelling reports in both web and PDF formats. This application uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to provide a report design environment that is less complex than the full Eclipse platform and SDK. If you need the project-based environment that the full Eclipse platform provides, install BIRT Report Designer instead. BIRT RCP Report Designer only runs on Windows.
To integrate reports that you create in BIRT RCP Report Designer into your J2EE-based web application, you also must install BIRT Report Engine. BIRT RCP Report Designer includes the components that are provided in the BIRT Demo Database package.
You install BIRT RCP Report Designer by downloading and extracting an archive (.zip) file. The following examples use Release 2.1.
Complete the following procedure to download and install BIRT RCP Report Designer on a Windows system.
How to install BIRT RCP Report Designer
Using your browser, navigate to the following URL:
Select the following build:
Release build 2_1_0
The BIRT Release Build: 2_1_0 page appears.
Choose the BIRT RCP Report Designer ZIP file:
birt-rcp-report-designer-2_1_0.zip
The Eclipse downloads page appears. This page shows all the sites that provide this download file.
Choose the download site that is closest to your location.
birt-rcp-report-designer-2_1_0.zip downloads to your system.
Extract the archive to a suitable directory. You can either create a directory or choose an existing directory. The root directory of the archive is birt-rcp-report-designer-2_1_0.
Download and extract the auxiliary files that are necessary for report viewing and PDF creation, as described in the following section.
BIRT Report Designer also requires iText, an open source Java-PDF library that BIRT uses to generate PDF versions of reports. You must install iText after you install BIRT Report Designer.
Installing a BIRT report designer is a straightforward task. If you extract the archive file to the appropriate location and the required supporting files are also available in the expected location, your BIRT report designer will work. Because of this fact, one of the first steps in troubleshooting an installation problem is confirming that you extracted all files to the correct location. In particular, verify that the /eclipse/plugins directory contains jar files whose names begin with org.eclipse.birt, org.eclipse.emf, and org.eclipse.gef. Beyond this step, there are a few things that you can do to resolve installation problems. The following sections describe ways of troubleshooting and resolving two common installation errors.
Eclipse caches information about plug-ins for faster start-up. After you install or upgrade BIRT Report Designer, using a cached copy of some pages can lead to errors or missing functionality. BIRT RCP Report Designer can also have this problem. Symptoms of this problem include:
The Report Design perspective does not appear in Eclipse.
You receive the message “An error occurred” when you open a report or use the report design perspective.
JDBC drivers that you installed do not appear in the driver manager.
The solution is to remove the cached information. The recommended practice is to start either Eclipse or BIRT from the command line with the -clean option.
To start Eclipse, use the following command:
eclipse -clean
To start BIRT RCP Report Designer, use the following command:
birt -clean
You can specify which Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to use when you start a BIRT report designer. This specification is important, particularly for users on UNIX, when path and permission problems prevent the report designer from locating an appropriate JVM to use. A quick way to overcome such problems is by specifying explicitly which JVM to use when you start the BIRT report designer.
In both Windows and UNIX systems, you can either start a BIRT report designer from the command line or create a command file or shell script that calls the appropriate executable file with the JVM path. The example in this section uses BIRT Report Designer on a Windows system.
How to specify which JVM to use when you start a BIRT report designer
On the command line, type a command similar to:
eclipse.exe -classpath <$JAVA_HOME>/j2sdk1.4.2_05/bin/java.exe
All BIRT user interface components and messages are internationalized through the use of properties files. BIRT uses English as the default language, but other languages are supported by installing a language pack that contains the necessary properties files. There are 24 BIRT language packs, four each for the following six BIRT products:
BIRT Report Designer Full Eclipse Install
BIRT Report Designer
BIRT RCP Report Designer
BIRT Report Engine
BIRT Chart Engine
BIRT Framework SDK
Each of the four language packs contains support for a specific set of languages. The names of the language packs are identical for each product, although the archive file names differ. The following list describes the four language packs and the languages that they support:
NLpack1
The NLpack1 language pack supports German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese.
NLpack2
The NLpack2 language pack supports Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian.
NLpack2a
The NLpack2a language pack supports Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Turkish.
NLpackBidi
The NLpackBidi language pack supports Arabic and Hebrew. Hebrew is only for Eclipse runtime, GEF runtime, and EMF runtime.
The following instructions explain how to download and install a language pack.
How to download and install a language pack
To download and install a language pack, perform the following steps:
Point your browser to the BIRT download page at:
In the Download section of the BIRT download page, choose Release Build 2_1_0.
In the Build Documentation section of the BIRT Release Build page, choose Language Packs.
Download the language pack for the product and language that meets your needs.
Extract the language pack archive file into the directory above the Eclipse directory.
Start Eclipse and choose Window→Preferences→Report Design→Preview.
Select the language of choice from the drop-down list in Choose your locale.
Restart Eclipse.
If Windows is not running under the locale you need for BIRT, start Eclipse using the -nl <locale> command line option, where <locale> is a standard Java locale code, such as es_ES for Spanish as spoken in Spain. Sun Microsystems provides a list of locale codes at the following URL:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/intl/locale.doc.html
Eclipse remembers the locale you specify on the command line. On subsequent launches of Eclipse, the locale is set to the most recent locale setting. To revert to a previous locale, launch Eclipse using the -nl command line option for the locale to which you want to revert.