Many applications we built have to provide reporting to allow end users to monitor results, progress, etc. In most cases a simple query and an Excel export is more than sufficient. In cases where more advanced reports are required we often look at projects like JasperReports or if that doesn't suffice maybe even Crystal Reports. As I'll try to explain in this blog, it might be worth your time to take a look at Eclipse BIRT.

The Eclipse “Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools” is one of those Eclipse projects I've been tracking for some time now. Its current release features a report designer based on our favorite IDE (also available as standalone download) which allows non-technical users to create reports with charts, tables, etc. It includes a web based report viewer application. It can of course execute the report designs, but also provides export capabilities (with AJAX column selection) and a range of other features.

For a more thorough overview of the features of BIRT, take a look at their website at http://eclipse.org/birt/phoenix. Features I found interesting:

• Standalone designer (based on the Eclipse IDE)
• Support for various datasources (including XML)
• Different output formats (with similiar layout)
  Currently it supports PDF and HTML, but there is also an (experimental) XLS emitter available. Look for "tribix" here: http://qauck.blogspot.com

In most cases we want to include the reporting directly in our applications (to be able to provide security, caching, etc.). Since most of our applications are built using the Spring framework it would be convenient if we could use BIRT by instantiating a few beans. As it turns out we can, but it took me some time reading (sometimes) badly documented source code and googling a lot. The remainder of this blog describes the steps I took to integrate BIRT in a sample Spring web application.

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Filed under Eclipse, Java, Spring | 9 Comments »