There are instances when it is desirable to build BIRT from its source distribution—if we are modifying BIRT, investigating a bug, or want to enhance the core of BIRT in some way. These are rare cases, but it is good to know how to build BIRT from source just in case. The following will walk you through building BIRT 2.5.2, but will work for 2.6 as well.

The first step is to retrieve the BIRT source code. The BIRT source is available from the BIRT Eclipse hompage. For 2.5.2, this is under http://download.eclipse.org/birt/downloads/build.php?build=R-R1-2_5_2-201002221500. The source package is located under the section labeled BIRT Source Code. Note the instructions saying there might be other libraries to install. We will probably need to download the Eclipse Data Tools project source code as well. We retrieve the ZIP file, but do not extract it. One will need a working copy of Eclipse in order to proceed. Here, we will be using an already extracted version of BIRT 2.5.2. It is recommended to have a version of the Java 5 JDK installed and set up as the compiler in an Eclipse workspace, and that the compiler settings are set to a level of Java 5. Also, under Window/General/Workspace, it is better to set the Text File Encoding to UTF-8.

Let's open our copy of Eclipse. When prompted, we create a new workspace called BirtSourceCode_2_5_2 in the directory of our choice.

Next we right-click on the Project Explorer, and select Import, and then Import… from its context menu.

Under the General section, we select Existing Projects into Workspace.

Let's selectelect the Archive File option and point to the location where we downloaded the BIRT 2.5.2 source ZIP file. We now select all of the projects within the archive and click Finish. If we get prompted by the install process about duplicate projects for WTP (Eclipse Web Tools Project), we just need to click Yes to all.

Once imported, Eclipse will start building the workspace. This can take from up to an hour depending on the speed of machine.

There will be a bunch of errors that may appear on machine. All these errors are related to the .nl projects. For our purposes, we do not need these projects. If we see an error saying that there is an invalid character constant in the Excel emitter, we will need to go to Window/Preferences/General/Workspace and set the character encoding to UTF-8.

To remove these errors, we open the window listing the log of errors, select all the errors, right-click, and select the Show In | Package Explorer option.

The projects with errors will be highlighted in the Project Explorer view. We can right-click on any one of the projects and choose Close Project.

Once the workspace is generated, we will have the BIRT core JARs built and ready. From here, there are a number of things one can do. One can select the Run Configurations menu option, and choose to run the BIRT Designer RCP run configuration to have a standalone BIRT designer application.