Multiple questions on BIRT engine

vavesw

We are working on building a reporting engine on tomcat.
But we have some questions still open on our side.

1) Can we have an engine running for the life time of the app server. I would like to start the platform as well as engine at the start of the app and close it only at the end of the app (stopped). I have seen articles where only the platform is started / stopped at the app start / stop events. Would like know if we can keep the engine as well running. Keep in mind that there can be be multiple reports using the same engine at the same time.

2) Can we have multiple engines but one platform running at the same time. This is required as each engine has its own configuration.

Would be very much useful for me if someone can give information regd these

Thanks

johnw

1: With an app like this, you only want a single Platform for each server. You can have a single ReportEngine, which is preferable, and for each report request, you create a new task. So in the initialize for the servlet, you start your Platform and create your report engine, and keep that persistent. Then for each doGet/doPost, you have that engine create a new Run/Render Task. Be sure to close the Run/Render tasks after you are done.

2: You can, but you don't gain anything. You really want to just have 1 Platform and 1 Engine, but you can have multiple engines at the cost of memory and performance. The tasks are what need to be unique per request. If you are using a different configuration for each engine, there shouldn't be a problem, but I can't imagine what would be different about each engine that you would need this.

John