Evaluating BIRT - dynamic columns within sub report

Manglesh

Hello All,

We are in process of evaluating reporting tools for our upcoming project. BIRT is one of the candidate that we see as promising tool that meets many of our requirements.
We are unable to find the solution to one of our requirement - that is to show table columns dynamically within detail report based on the outer record from master table.

Here is what we want to achieve -

We show list of services offered by the company. Lets call it Service 1, Service 2 etc.. For each of these services, we want to show the discounts offered at different locations
call it loc1, loc2 etc.. the locations at where discounts are offered is dependent on each service. So Service 1 may have locations of loc1 and loc2 only while service 2
may have discounts for loc1, loc3 and loc4. The layout will looks something like below :

Service 1
Weight Loc1 Loc2
1-10 10% 20%
11-50 20% 30%

Service 2
Weight Loc1 Loc3 Loc4
1-10 10% 20% 30%
11-50 20% 30% 40%


We are planning to use Scripted data source which will use Java Domain objects to provide the data for the same. We envision this to have master detail relationship where master table will
show list of services and detail table will show discounts for each of the services. The problem is that we dont know how to create dynamic columns within the detail subreport based on
the given service. We looked at implementing TableEventAdapter for detail report but the only method that has referece to updating table layout is onPrepare() and that is called only once and not for each
outer row. while onCreate() and onRender() is called for each row of the outer table, but they dont have any reference to object that will allow creating columns dynamically.

Any sample code or the pointer to the solution will be greatly appreciated. This would determine if we can go with BIRT as majority of our tables require this kind of relationship.

Thanks a lot.

Manglesh

mwilliams

Hi Manglesh,

At first glance, I think you should be able to handle this with a crosstab. It may depend on how your data is set up though. If you can attach a sample of data and show in here what you want that sample to look like in your report, I can see if I can put together a quick example.