Parametrization in BIRT

gombost

Greetings Everyone!

I'm new to BIRT and I a bit confused at the moment. So far I have played a little with the BIRT Report Designer, created a library with templates, etc.

Now I'd like to design a report with parameters. In the designer I've found the New Report Parameter option in the Data drop down menu. Also I've already taken a few looks on the examples in this topic found in the DevShare section.

After all of this, there are quite a few questions came up.
What is the proper way to use the value of the parameters?
Where can I found a tutorial or documentation about parametrization?
How can I use these parameters? Is it possible to use only the Report Designer, or do I have to write in the XML source (I saw an example where the paramters were used in the SQL queries in a method called beforeOpen) or do I have to use the design (chart, etc...) APIs?
Is there a good tutorial for these APIs?
How do you use parameters in a chart? I saw an example and there were a lots of lines of code that described the chart in XML (within the original XML of the report and those lines were ca. 90% of the whole XML), and there was a JavaScript function in this part (the function was beforeDrawDataPoint(...)).


Thank you in advance!

Happy

Report Parameters are like Input Arguments, You can use them however you see fit to modify the behaviour of the Report Rendering.

They can be dragged and dropped into the design, or bound to a dataset to modify the SQL query in some way, or use as a boolean to determine the behaviour of particular elements within the design.

Basically, so long as you can code it, you can use it.