What is the best Birt xlsx emitter ?

xrorox

Hi,

We are migrating xlsx exports created with librabries like infragistic to Birt.

We are looking for a xlsx Birt that would allow us a degree of control on when a cell is merged or not.
I'm not speaking of the cells we can merge in the design editor or through the design api in beforeFactory.

The crosstabs merge cells with identical values automatically. And we wish to do the same thing inside tables, because some of our uses cases are too complicated for crosstabs (mix of fixed and dynamic columns, with varying dimensions hierarchies).

Also a use case where we had problem, was to get a crosstab cell to render as a merged cell in xlsx format (colspan of 2 basically).

Thanks for your advices.

jfranken

I have a few of comments:

• It's unlikely you will get a response to the emitter question because the standard XLSX emitter and the Spudsoft Excel emitter are the two popular choices (possibly the only emitters that are commercially available, I'm not sure). If the two options don't work for you and you want an emitter customized to your requirements, you will probably need to contract OpenText Professional Services to build you an emitter for the commercial designer.

• Having spent time looking at the sample spreadsheet you attached to a post in the other thread, I think what you are trying to do is display master-detail groups and subgroups as columns. This type of design is not normally done because it is much more practical to make a report expand longer when the amount of data increases than it is for the report to expand wider. Also, the column merging you are trying to achieve is done by simple grouping when the database row data is displayed as rows on the report instead of being converted to multiple columns with rows for the outer group only. I realize that you did not create the design. The requirements came from existing reports. I just wanted to point out that if you can negotiate changes to the design, the reports will not only be easier to build, they will also be more readable and more adaptable to additional data.

• For your design, you might consider embedding tables inside table cells. That way you can do merging of columns and displaying of extra columns using visibility rules on the embedded tables. It should export reasonably well to Excel.