The BIRT platform supports a plugin structure based on Eclipse. A part of the BIRT Plug-in Extension Points are the Emitter extension points. Emitters are plugins that handle the rendering of reports to different formats.
Out of the box, BIRT comes with several different emitters. BIRT can output to the following format with the default Emitters:
- HTML
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Excel
- RTF
- Microsoft Powerpoint
- Adobe Postscript
In the BIRT Web Designer, the different output formats are available under the Run | View Report menu.
When using the BIRT Web Viewer, we can specify different report formats by using the __format URL parameter. If we specify __format=pdf, it will output in the Adobe PDF format, and if we specify __format=xls, then the Viewer will output in the Microsoft Excel format.
In addition to the URL parameter, there is also an Export dialog available in the frameset servlet.
