We caught a brief glimpse of some of the
more advanced BIRT report development topics (like the Expression Editor) and got
an idea of how BIRT stores reports internally (the hierarchy from the Grids exercise).
By now, you should feel pretty comfortable with dragging elements around the BIRT
workspace, how to get access to properties, and how to work with the Outline to
select components and move their position in the BIRT report layout.
You may notice that I left a few components of the Palette out of our discussion, such
as the Table, the List, the Chart (and the Crosstab if you are looking at BIRT 2.2). The
reason is that these are data bound components, which require a Data Source. While
we discussed this briefly in Chapter 3, I want to discuss this more in depth in the
next chapter.
Working with Data
The previous chapters have focused on the BIRT working environment and the
visual elements used to develop reports, sans the data element. In this chapter, we
are going to focus on the data-specific elements of the BIRT environment, build some
example reports using data from the example Classic Cars database, and work with
a separate MySQL database.
BIRT Data Capabilities
As BIRT is a Java-centric reporting environment built on top of Eclipse, many
different data tools provide BIRT with their data capabilities.
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