Developing Brochure Like Reports

abhishes

Hello,

I don't know anything about BIRT. I am wondering if for a current requirement we should consider birt or not.

One of my customer wants a report developed. This report is 25 page long and mostly contains static text. The report is always in PDF format.

In some places in the PDF document, we need charts / graphs (mostly horizontal bar graphs). The data for the graph has to be extracted from a MySQL database.

There are certain fields in the PDF document where we need to fill in the values after querying the DB.

I feeling was that this requirement can be easily met with a PDF generation library like iTEXT. But the customer feels that iText + Java is not a productive solution and a reporting tool like BIRT may be more applicable.

So the question is... based on the information provided above is BiRT the right tool for us?

Mind you that more than 75% text on each page of the report is static and is very richly formatted. This has to be produced as is in the PDF document. Its only in some places we need dynamic data.

If you feel BIRT is the right tool for our requirement then I will buy some books and start doing the development on birt. Otherwise I am quite comfortable with Java + iTEXT.

Regards,
Abhishek

Virgil Dodson

Hi Abhishek,

Can you explain a bit more about this process?... especially the part about "fill in the values after querying the DB". Generally, with BIRT, you can save lots of time by having a WYSIWYG report design that you can easily modify instead of writing/modifying new lines of code. Are you considering querying the database, displaying to the user (maybe in a browser), and then taking both of those results and rendering a single PDF? If so, where are you storing the users values... and are they known before seeing the data from the database? One option is to have a parameterized BIRT report that accepts values from the user, combines that with the database data, and then renders the report. When you want to change the report, there is no compiling, just replace the report design and not the code. If the user must see the database data first, then add to the data, then you must consider where you will store that data... which will be the same whether or not you use BIRT. If this is the case, you might check into the TEXT control within a BIRT report to use something like a HTML form to collect the information from the user, send it back to a persistance of some sort (file, db, etc), and then rendering the final report as PDF also from a BIRT report. Let me know if you have questions.