This chapter discussed the various visual report elements that one can use to design BIRT reports. The chapter covered how the various panes in the workspace cooperate together to create and manipulate BIRT reports such as using the component Palette to drag report items over to the Report Design pane, selecting elements in the Outline, moving objects in the Outline under other components, and changing their properties in the Property Editor. The chapter also briefly covered some of the more advanced BIRT report development topics such as the Expression Editor, and got an idea of how BIRT stores reports internally (the hierarchy from the Grids exercise). By now, we should feel pretty comfortable with dragging elements around the BIRT workspace, getting access to properties, and working with the Outline view to select components and move them in the BIRT report layout.

If we look at the Palette, we may notice a few components left such as the Table, the List, the Chart, and the Crosstab. This is because these are data bound components that require a data source. While we discussed this briefly in the previous chapter, I will like to discuss this more deeply in the next chapter.