New to Birt | From Button to Invoice.

mack-bell

Hello,

I?m pretty new to BIRT and I need some help.
I did an application for breeding Reptiles and to sale them. For this application I use a HSQLDB as Datasource and I want to make Invoices.

Now I worked a bit with the Report designer but only managed to get full Tables listed.

I?ve searched for a good Tutorial on how to work with BIRT but I couldn?t find one I understood.

What I would like to do is the following:

-Build an Invoice with the Report Builder
-Have the Database searched for the information about the specific invoice(from my java application).
-Have the Invoice filled with the information from the Database.
-Have a pdf made from this report and saved to a specific location.

So I would like to hit a button in the invoice gui and produce an PDF with the invoice in it.
Also is it better to fill the Report with information from a POJO with a scripted datasource or is it possible to send the invoice number to the Report for a WHERE Clause?

Right now I haven?t found a tutorial I understood to this grade.

Is it possible to ask BIRT to make a report and give the specific Invoice number for the database-query?

Please don?t understand this wrong, I don?t want to have an explaination on how to do this all but a good tutorial would be very helpful. If someone knows a good tutorial that explains what I want to do, that would help a lot.

I hope I explained what I want to do and I hope that someone has the time to help me or just knows a good tutorial that could help me.

Many Thanks
Thorsten

cypherdj

This contains a few examples of reports that should work straight away for you using your installed report designer. these reports use the sample database that ships with the birt engine.

there is a sales invoice example which you will find very helpful i think for your first part of the question.

as you know from the designer, you can generate your report as PDF, HTML, ...

in your case, the question is what level of integration of BIRT do you want with your application? From what you're describing, you don't want to actually display this pdf to the user, but simply store it in a folder, right? no sending straight to the printer either?

if that is correct, then you might want to look at this devshare which does exactly that:

http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/devshare/designing-birt-reports/1400-call-birt-report-using-batch-file/

Now all you need is to make a System.command() call on handling of the click of your button if the birt runtime is on the same machine as your web server.

Obviously, you could also integrate the runtime into your web application as well, it just really depends on your needs, but this should do what you need.

I hope this helps,
Cedric