BIRT Reports, Java and Stack Overflow Error

bmario

Hi everyone!

Even though I have quite some time working with birt I'm still quite a newbie about how should I use... Currently I have a java standalone application that runs a set of BIRT reports, some of them have their queries defined in them (lets call them type A), while some of them receive the whole dataset as a report parameter (from now on type ... When I execute one of those reports with a lot of data (either type A or I get a stackoverflow error because java runs out of memory basically (if I'm not wrong), so instead of trying to allow java to have more memory available when running, I'm trying to see if there is another way to properly do this 'cause I might be doing something wrong here...

First of all I'd like to know if there is a way for me to pass a Java Object to the BIRT report as a parameter and execute it inside BIRT to obtain the dataset I should use, instead of having the dataset twice in memory (one in my java application and the second one in the BIRT report/engine)?. Can I do that in a place other than in the onPrepare section of my scripted dataset?

Also, is there a way to generate a paginated report? For example, can I generate a 150pages pdf report 1 page at a time and then join it somehow later in a disk file? without losing the report's own pagination (as in "page x of 150"?

Last but not least, is there any documentation about BIRT standards or best/recommended practices that I could use in the future?

Thanks in advance for you help

PS: I'm using BIRT 3.7

JasonW

Do all of these questions revolve around running the reports using the API? If so you can always add an appcontext variable in the task that has your data in it. Then in the beforeOpen of your scripted dataset get it like. reportContext.getAppContext().get("yourvar");
In the re api use
task.getAppContext().put("yourva", data);

You can render one page at a time using a run task to generate a rptdocument and then a render task for each page you want to render.

IRenderOption options = new RenderOption();
options.setOutputFormat("pdf");
long pgcnt = document.getPageCount();
options.setOutputFileName("output/resample/mcb.pdf");


if( options.getOutputFormat().equalsIgnoreCase("html")){
HTMLRenderOption htmlOptions = new HTMLRenderOption( options);
htmlOptions.setImageDirectory("output/image");
htmlOptions.setHtmlPagination(false);
//set this if you want your image source url to be altered
htmlOptions.setBaseImageURL("http://myhos/prependme?image=");
htmlOptions.setHtmlRtLFlag(false);
htmlOptions.setEmbeddable(false);
}else if( options.getOutputFormat().equalsIgnoreCase("pdf") ){

PDFRenderOption pdfOptions = new PDFRenderOption( options );
//options.setOutputStream(arg0)
pdfOptions.setOption( IPDFRenderOption.FIT_TO_PAGE, new Boolean(true) );
pdfOptions.setOption( IPDFRenderOption.PAGEBREAK_PAGINATION_ONLY, new Boolean(true) );
pdfOptions.setOption(IPDFRenderOption.PAGE_OVERFLOW, IPDFRenderOption.FIT_TO_PAGE_SIZE);

}

IRenderTask task = engine.createRenderTask(document);

task.setRenderOption(options);
//task.setPageRange("1-3");
task.setPageNumber(3);
//task.setReportlet("chart3");
task.render();
task.close();
document.close();


If you render each page to pdf you could use iText to combine them. I am not certain this is an optimal approach though.

Jason