We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We explored how to create most of the elements that connect to different Data Sources in a report. and report projects. We saw that BIRT supports different types of data such as XML files, flat text files, and databases. We saw that for each type of Data Source, there are different types of dialogs to describe the data and create datasets. We saw how to bring in the different data bound components. We also explored a few different methods of inserting visual components into a report layout and how to change different properties of components. We saw in detail how to group related data based on the value of columns, how to create a calculated result using some basic expressions, and how to work with the outline, the property editor, and the layout editor.

Hopefully by this point you are getting more comfortable with working in the BIRT environment. This is getting us ready to build some really interesting reports in later chapters. But there are elements that we have not covered but are needed to build fully functional reports. In the next chapter, we are going to learn how to get user input for reports so that they can fi lter data in a manner they need. We are also going to look at how report parameters are different from Dataset parameters, how they can be linked together, and how report parameters can be used in a data independent way to effect layout of reports. We will also explore the usage of Highlights and Maps.