What differentiates projects from regular folders is a special file
inside this folder, usually named .project, that defines various properties for the
project. For your general purpose report development, you don't really need to know
anything else about this file. Just know that projects are simply folders that contain
all the files related to your project.
Report Projects and Libraries
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Project types are defined when you first create your project. In earlier versions of
BIRT, there was only a Report Project type. In newer versions of BIRT, there are
many different types of projects that are BIRT related. We have been working with
the Report Project throughout the book. For the remainder of the book, we will
continue using the BIRT Report Project; just keep in mind that there are other Report
Project types as well. In BIRT 2.2, there are the BIRT ODA Designer Plug-in and the
BIRT ODA Runtime Plug-in projects. You can build your own custom BIRT Open
Data drivers for the BIRT Designer and BIRT Runtimes, respectively. There are also
web-based development projects, such as the BIRT Charting Web Project (which will
contain BIRT Chart Runtime components for a J2EE Web Project) and the BIRT Web
Project (which will contain the BIRT Report Engine for a J2EE Web Project). So if
you are building Java Servlets to handle report execution, you can do so using these
pre-defined project types.
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