So it uses a design interface similar to Dreamweaver or NVU. BIRT,
out of the box, does not provide layers. In the Report Designer, components will be
resized, shaped, and adjusted to give an approximation on how an HTML engine
will render them. For such design principles in their strictest sense, this is a much
better method as it does most of the alignment and proximity rendering for you.
Chapter 3
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The designer also has several other tabs associated with it. The Master Page tab will
open a designer that allows users to design a constant header and footer layout that
will remain persistent on multi-page reports. These would be separate from the table
headers and rows used in the Layout Editor.
The Script tab is for more advanced report developers, and allows for overloading
report events associated with report elements. BIRT uses an event-based model for
report rendering; so overloading particular events allows the user to control and
manipulate at a much finer level the way a particular report will be displayed to
the user. This also allows report developers to add in advanced business logic to
report designs. BIRT utilizes the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine to accomplish this.
In addition to internal report script, BIRT also allows developers to provide event
handlers in external Java objects.
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