Now that we are familiar with the different aspects of the BIRT Workspace, what next? What does it all mean, how does it all work together, and how do we use it? Well, that is what we are going to explore next as we build a simple report. As far as the components are concerned, we will describe them in detail in the next chapter. So for now just follow along and see how to navigate in the BIRT environment.
The first thing we want to do when setting up our simple report project is to define what the project is going to be, and what our first simple report will do. Our first report will be a simple dump of the employees who work for Classic Cars.
First, we need to set up a project. To do this, we will use the Navigator. We need to make sure we have the BIRT report perspective open as described previously. We perform the following steps to create our project:
- Open up the Navigator by clicking on the Navigator tab.
- Right-click anywhere in the whitespace in the Navigator.
- Select New from the menu, and under New select Project.
- From the dialog screen, select Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools from the list of folders, expand that view, and select Report Project. Then click the Next button.
Now, we have a simple report project in which we will store our BIRT reports that we will built in the first few chapters of the book.