Creating projects in BIRT is no different from creating projects of other types in Eclipse, such as Java projects.

In this screenshot we can see the New Project wizard with the different types of BIRT Projects available. This will vary based on the plugins we have installed. In this screenshot, I have a plugin for BIRT Web Projects and Charting web projects from earlier versions of BIRT.

As we have seen previously, report project creation is simple. The general steps to create a Report Project were illustrated in Chapter 3, The BIRT Environment and First Report. Therefore, I will touch only a few points as there are a few different ways to create projects in Eclipse.

Project creation is possible from the File menu and from the Navigator.

In the preceding screenshot, we can see the New option of the File menu, with the Project... option highlighted.

In this screenshot we can see the New menu in the Navigator, accessed using the right-click context menu. Creating report projects from the Navigator is essentially the same as with the File menu, with the only difference being that when we create a project in the File menu, we will go to File | New | Project… instead of right-clicking in the Navigator pane. If we are not in the BIRT perspective, we will have different options available under the New menu, as seen in the following screenshot when the Java perspective is open.

As we can see, in the Java perspective, the new Report, Template, and Library options for BIRT are also available. It is advisable to create new projects and reports from the BIRT perspective, however, as most of the workbench sections, such as the Palette, do not open by default.