Dynamically add reports as subreports to a master report

vvarghese

Hi,

I am developing a reporting application where a user can select(and order) reports from a list of 100 reports and ask for a master report. This master report should contain all the selected reports in the exact order, with a table of contents listing the (sub)reports included in the master report and correct page number.

How do I accomplish this is BIRT? I was using Pentaho before this and was able to accomplish the same there by adding each user selected report as a subreport at runtime(i.e. programmatically) to a master report, which was really a place holder report.

Now I know BIRT has the notion of subreport, but I am unable to make sense of the BIRT DE API to accomplish what had earlier done with Pentaho to create a master report. So, how do I do this?

From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/228458/how-do-i-combine-multiple-birt-reports, it seems that this was not possible with BIRT in 2008. Is this still the case? Can't I take independent reports and add them as subreports to another report?

Thanks & Regards,
Vineeth.

CBR

BIRT Subreports are quite different from the Subreports in Crystal Report or Pentaho Report.
In BIRT a subreport is a table/chart within a table and not a reference in a report to another report (to include the subreports content into a master report)
What you can do within BIRT is to create the subtable in a separate report, copy it into another table at runtime and set the tables parameter (subreports in BIRT are using tables that have a parameter) to corresponding value (e.g. customernumber of master record in case you want to show orders for customer).
As you can see it would be possible to achieve the same functionality in BIRT but it would be much harder.