Newbie - Does BIRT really suck this bad...or is it just me?

I'm a developer for a software company with a product that could really benefit from a good report designer. A couple of us had previously had a cursory look at BIRT and were excited to integrate it...but after reading a good BIRT book, searching forums and posts, running tutorials, and just messing with it, I am VERY disappointed with several things. Can some of you who have used this product more than me please tell me if I'm just **** up, or if it really does have these problems:

1. BIRT uses XPath for XML data sets, but doesn't use a complete implementation. It can't do things like selecting nodes based on their textual content, and it has no support for several regular operators, like and and or.

2. Data sources and data sets are not shared among reports in a project.

3. If you use the Eclipse BIRT designer and insert images or charts...if you resize them using the designer, that resize will not work for the PDF output, only for the web output.

4. The PDF output for cross-tab tables omits the row headers and will not constrain itself to the size you give it in the designer.

5. When you insert images in the designer by reference to the URI, you have to actually enclose the URI in quotes or BIRT will barf.

6. What you see in the report designer is not what you get for output size unless you make sure to give your report elements fixed widths.

I'm really not trying to hash on the product, but I have to make a recommendation to my bosses about using BIRT and I really need to know if it's just me or if BIRT is really supposed to act this way.

I've attached my report template XML and the XML data source if you're inclined to look.

Thx.

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Comments

bhanley

I can address some of your concerns.

1) The BIRT XML Data Source is "quirky" if you are trying to really harness the full power of XPath. The reason for this is that the Data set is trying to transform your XML into a tabular data set. As such, it wants to flatten the XML and force it to conform to a column/row paradigm.

I have your XML, so if you can give me an idea how you want to apply it in the report, I can try and construct a sample that implements the XML Data Source to suit your requirement.

2) Data Sources and Data sets (and any other report component for that matter) can be shred across not only projects, but your entire enterprise. BIRT has a concept of Report Libraries. These libraries can hold Data Sources, Data Sets, Styles, charts, etc...

3) The chart re-size should work across all output formats once the chart size is set in the designer. The image re-size could theoretically differ. How are you resizing the chart or image? Simply dragging the re-size handle on the canvas or setting the height/width manually? The main issue when dealing with sizing is that the web allows for variable sizing and the PDF output is constrained by a printed page. A sample here would help the debugging process as well.

4) Sorry to be redundant, but an sample will help here too. How are you setting the size in the designer? Explicitly managing it by pixels? Inches? I have not seen the headers get omitted in my samples. I have attached a cross tab using the sample data base (so you can run it) that looks good in my testing in both HTML and PDF. Do you see the same results?

5) I think this is one of the things you learn through using the designer. I do not think ther is any help I can offer on the quotes.

6) I guess this is more of a statement than a question. One of the more powerful features of BIRT is its ability to use auto layout to make the best use of the screen size available. This is really essential in web applications. Moving form the screen to paper (like for PDF output) can make this a little more finicky. The ability to fix widths on the page gets around this as you have seen.

I hope these answers and the attached cross tab sample help clear up some or all of your concerns around BIRT. The forums are here to help, so please keep bringing your questions here and we will do what we can to address them.

Thanks!

elbeau

Thanks for the reply, I'm really not trying to hash on BIRT, just understand it.

If you use the report template and data source XML I originally attached, you can see what happens to the PDF and you can see exactly what I did to make it look right in the designer and web view. It is significantly bad in a lot of ways in the PDF. If we use BIRT, we will be asking a lot of large companies to use it to designed advanced reports from the system they bought from us. I need to feel comfortable that they won't find it "buggy" compared to the rest of our product line.

I read up more on the XPath stuff and why it is done the way it is (SAX). That's understandable for some things, but not for others. SAX parsing would not preclude doing "and" or "or" operations...but it is what it is and I understand that.

Thanks for your help, I really do appreciate it.

bhanley

I took a quick look at the design. For your detail column in the cross tab, you have set a fixed with of 372 pixels (see the attached screen shot). This width is being repeated over and over on the PDF output and that is why it is spilling over the page's boundary.

I will tweak the report some today and post an update in a bit.

bhanley

OK, I made some subtle changes to your design and things look remarkably better. I have attached the design and a screen shot of the PDF rendering of the design (The actual PDF is too large to post to the forums).

Here is a high-level summary of what I did:

1) I deleted the cross-tab you had there and re-created it. You had been tweaking the settings quite a bit, so rather than try and undo all the different tweaks (and maybe miss something), I re-created a clean one to ensure the formatting was being handled the way I wanted. FYI, I did not hard-code ANY width settings on the cross-tab. Instead I inherited them from the container.

2) I added rows to the central grid on the top and the bottom for the chart and the cross tab. To make the report look as you designed it originally, I merged the cells into a single cell for the row and removed the background shading. This allows me to embed components in the grid and use the layout settings there (you have a hard-coded with on the grid of 7.75 inches).

I did this embedding to let the grid be the primarry controller for page layout. This is one of the primary roles the Grid control can fill for you. Now you can tweak the page-level settings in one place and the controls down the food chain will pick those changes up without you having to ensure the changes match at each level of the hierarchy.

3) I moved the cross-tab and the chart into the grid.

Does this look a little more like what you are looking for?

elbeau

Yes, that looks much better. I appreciate you taking time to work through this with me.

elbeau

I guess how I feel in the end is that the XPath stuff is less than ideal, but not a show stopper, but the BIRT designer is not ready for prime time. The values I set were all set because I used the designer and it set those values. If I have to recommend BIRT to my user base, it will be difficult to tell them how great it is while having to show them a lot of workarounds for the designer problems.

bhanley

I am not sure if you have spent any time digging into some of the tutorials and "how-to" exercises for the Designer itself. You may find that the time spent would remove most if not all doubts you have about exposing it to your users. 
 
Check out the DevShare on this site or the two main books detailing BIRT and the designer: 
 
Basic BIRT Overview: <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.amazon.com/BIRT-Field-Guide-Reporting-Eclipse/dp/0321580273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248721735&sr=8-1'>Amazon.com: BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (2nd Edition) (Eclipse Series) (9780321580276): Diana Peh, Nola Hague, Jane Tatchell: Books</a> 
 
More Advanced BIRT Concepts: <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.amazon.com/Integrating-Extending-BIRT-2nd-Eclipse/dp/0321580303/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1248721735&sr=8-3'>Amazon.com: Integrating and Extending BIRT (2nd Edition) (Eclipse Series) (9780321580306): Jason Weathersby, Tom Bondur, Iana Chatalbasheva, Don French: Books</a> 
 
Good Luck!