Integrating Eclipse's BIRT into Compiere

[red1]

After much ado, i finally seen the light at the end of this long and winding tunnel.

Here is the grape of the proof : http://compiere.red1.org/BIRT.gif

Here is what i can remember of the ardous journey:

1) Came across BIRT (Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools from Actuate that collaborated with Eclipse to whack the world with whats left of it) when it was release alpha 2 years ago. Prophesised the doom of Crystal Reports and Mondrian/JPivot but was further shuned by proprietory zealots.
2) Installed BIRT when it was Release 1.0 a year ago but couldnt drill into Compiere nor see much samples that makes the heart flutter.

3) Few months ago watch with anxiety as BIRT produce its Mileston but pre 2.0 build. Still couldnt get that damn thing to work fully. Moreover was pretty much into JasperReports and IReport editor (confort that needs a truckload to dislodge me from)

4) Last few days saw the Release 2.0 and after following the instructions, going under the hood to see why it doesnt crank, finally made a compiere.rptdesign that basically drills into a live Oracle Compiere DB and pull out couple of columns from Fact_Acct table.

4.1) This morning, thinking of striking when the iron is hot, began looking at how to integrate it into an application, found out that its deployed into JBoss or any app server and called from a basic URL.

4.2) Failed in JBoss attempt

4.3) Successfully deployed in Tomcat5.5

History in the making... (refer to GIF image above)

4.4) The real cool foretelling of things to come is when i pressed the 3rd icon at the top to export and it pops up a selector ( http://compiere.red1.org/BIRT2.gif ) that chooses what fields to export to CSV! And it DID!! All this within few clicks.

5.0) Will strike further inland to do research BIRT objects & scripting so that we can produce the likes of Orders, Invoice, PO but more importantly Profit Analyses, Cash Flows, Pie Charts. Like Larry King use to say, "Don't go away".

Here... BIRTie, birtie, birtie...*^*

[clapas]

[red1]

Pls refer to www.eclipse.org/birt . It has everything explained. However i still uses JasperReports as i said before, its not easy to learn anything new. JasperReports is also getting quite advanced and has most things BIRT talks about early on.
For those using it should stick to it until at least one more year when BIRT matures further. But then JasperReports gets better all the time too!

[neilg]

Hooray to red1 for trailblazing this new and exciting path!