The BIRT Environment and Your First Report
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Report Designer
In any visual IDE on the market, there is a part of the user interface that allows
a developer to manipulate the look and feel of what they are developing. In
programming environments such as Visual Basic, this would be the Form designer.
In web development environments such as Adobe Dreamweaver, this is the
Designer tab. In BIRT, we use the Report Designer. The Report designer is the
section of the BIRT workspace that takes up the most real estate, by default. It is
denoted by the title of the report design that is currently open, and has multiple tabs
on the bottom part.
Reports need to have an interface to the user, and this is where you design that. This
is where you drag the visual components from the Palette in order to work with, and
get that exact look and feel necessary to display your information. Working with
the Report Designer can be a little tricky if you do not know what to expect; so let
me set your expectations now. BIRT is not a pixel-perfect "What You See Is What
You Get" (WYSIWYG) development environment. So if you are expecting things
to design perfect visual layouts for reports for use in printing, or a pixel perfect
design interface like Visual Basic, BIRT does not provide this out of the box. BIRT
is designed as a primarily online report technology, and as such it is heavily
HTML-driven.
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