Deploying a Stand Alone BIRT Report

jjfeigal

My organization develops BIRT reports using the BIRT Designer in Eclipse, and up to this time the reports are deployed under a Tomcat birt-viewer application for access by users in multiple locations.

We have a situation where we want to develop a custom report for a specific single user. Periodically the user would generate an XML data file that they would save on their Windows Desktop. The data source for the BIRT Report would be the XML data file on the desktop.

I know that we could install an instance of Eclipse with the BIRT designer on the user's work station, define a BIRT Reports Project, drop the report in the project, and write up detailed instructions for naming the XML data file on their desktop as well as instruction on how to run the report in the BIRT viewer in the BIRT designer. This is getting much more technical than would normally be expected for this type of user.

Also, I know that we could purchase the Actuate iServer product, but the cost is prohibitive.

We would prefer to not publish this report as we do our other reports. I may be utterly naive, but is there an easy way to deploy a BIRT report to a Windows desktop for a single user. It doesn't hurt to ask, does it?

JasonW

If the schema does not change and the location is always the same place why not write a little re api java app that the user could run and get his output in pdf. So the user would download a zip file once containing the birt runtime, the report, and a bat file to run either the reportrunner class or your custom class and it would emit a pdf for them.

Jason