JSF and Birt Design Best Practices

cgswtsu78

Hello,

I'm new to Birt and I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction as to how to implement Birt in a JAVA/JSF web application. The purpose of our Birt use will be to dynamically display charts based on our database. There will be times when the data in the database is in sufficient for and business logic isn't needed to produce a chart and there will also be some customization that will need to be done to the data before rendering the chart.

We currently have several REST web services and entity classes representing the data in our database and the available APIs for that data. The questions are as follows:

1. Does Birt work with REST web services as far as using the rest APIs results as a dataset?


2. Is it a better design approach to always populate Java pojos from the REST apis and then configure Birt to use the Java POJOs as the charts datasets? What are the advantages of doing so vs connection Birt using JDBC?

3. Are there any known issues with integrating JSF and Birt?

4. Can anyone point me to a good example of generating a Birt chart dynamically in a JSF application?

Rainer

Hi,

I don´t have any expirience in using web services as datasources but in my opinion using java objects to provide data for the reports should work with birt. You could also use sql via jdbc (I think using stored procedures is the most flexible way to provide data).
I´ve written a jsf application integrating report engine completly. This means for example data for parameter page comes from database but presentation was made by using jsf. Reports are rendered by report engine and presented via jsf. This approach works fine but I coudn´t find any example on the web so I did it on my own.
Because of the huge amount of data we have to process and the limited ajax support in jsf (myfaces) we decided to use some other technology for the presentation layer. The integration approach is the same with both technologies. If you want to use jsf to intergrate birt report engine let me know but I think you first should look at the integration hints provided at the birt homepage.

regards Rainer