BIRT's primary focus is on reporting and does not include other tools as such.
Conventions Used in This Book
The purpose of this book is to familiarize users with the BIRT Report Designer. In
order to do so, I have decided to alternate between two different scenarios in order
to demonstrate the capabilities of BIRT, to familiarize you??”the reader??”with BIRT
features, and to allow you an opportunity to follow along.
One set of reports will be built using the Classic Cars example database that comes
with every BIRT distribution. This gives us an opportunity to allow you to follow
along with examples, and try them out on your own. The data schema used in
Classic Cars is a very simple schema, and will require only a basic understanding of
SQL to follow along. This will allow us to give you some basic reporting examples,
such as listing reports, Drill-Down reports, some basic charts, and some of the other
BIRT features; other features of BIRT include parameters, scripting, and the BIRT
report emitters.
However, unlike most other books, I am also providing you an opportunity to follow
along with a real-life reporting scenario as well. I am also including examples of
reports for the BIRT Bugzilla database. I feel these are beneficial to readers not only
as a source of learning, but as an example of how the BIRT platform can be used in
a real-world scenario.
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