Some familiarity with SQL is assumed; however, the
queries used in the exercises and examples will be provided for those who are not
familiar with SQL.
Working with Data
[ 70 ]
In Chapter 3, we looked at a very simple employee listing report, using the Classic
Cars database. To avoid duplicating exercises, we will leverage that report in
the following discussions, in order to demonstrate the remaining data-centric
components of BIRT. It will also illustrate how to get data from data containers
into reports.
Understanding the Data Components
of BIRT
BIRT's data connection capabilities can be broken up into two main logical
constructs. Well, actually there would be three; however, for the purposes of
our discussion, we only need to think about two. The first is the Data Source. A
Data Source is information about physical connections to Databases, text files, or
some other data source. In the Classic Cars example, the Data Source is the ODA
connection information. If we were connecting to a MySQL database, the Data
Source would contain information such as the IP Address or DNS name of the
database server, the database name, and the user name and password we are using
to connect to the database. The Data Sources themselves do not usually contain any
data that we will display in our report. There are exceptions, but they are few.
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