The BIRT Environment and Your First Report
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Summary
For a very simple report design, we utilized all of the major areas of the BIRT
perspective. We used the Navigator to create a new report project and a new report
design, the Data explorer to create out data connection and Data Set, dragged
elements from the Outline to the Report Designer to get the data elements into the
right place, and used the Property Editor and Outline cooperatively to bold the text
in the table header.
In the coming chapters we will build more complex reports, and in the process,
explain what the various BIRT report elements are and what they can do.
Visual Report Components
In the previous chapter, we looked at the BIRT workspace. You should be familiar
with the environment you will use to build BIRT reports. Now we get to take a
look at each of the individual BIRT report elements, some of their uses, and some of
their common properties. By gaining some familiarity with these components, you
can save yourself a good amount of headache in working with BIRT. A surprising
number of questions come up on performing some of the more common functions
with BIRT components, such as how to format numbers as currency or limit
decimal places, how to format dates, and other questions about features that can be
influenced by using simple BIRT properties.
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