Can reports be viewed using shared hosting providers?

SG129

First post, so Hi
I have just downloaded the BIRT Report Designer because I am interested to see how a report is deployed to the internet.
I have looked through lots of documentation and see many things mentioned like engines and runtimes, and kinda got lost in it all, so could someone please enlighten me.

All of the report creation side of things look pretty familiar to me, but once I have a series of working reports, can the reports (alone) be viewed in a web browser by my users like they would view any other php or html file, or do I need a separate viewer or something installed on my server to handle the drill down link creation and linked file locations?

I don't require any security or user login to view the reports, I just want to give out the url to the first report and let the drill down links do the rest of the work.

The reason I ask is this...
I am developing a closed loop system based on 9 drill down reports that use a mysql connection and contain sub report, chart and crosstab elements.
I have tried using both Pentaho and Jasper iReports, but after completing the reports I found that both of those BI tools require a separate file repository server system to be installed, and my domain provided will not allow them because of my shared hosting package.

CBR

Hi,

a browser can only view a file as it is. By designing a report using the BIRT designer you kind of describe the desired output: You configure your database connection, query data and build some nice tables presenting the information. The resulting file has extension .rptdesign and is a XML file. This xml file contains all that metadata but not a single record of your dataset.
If you want to make a PDF or HTML file using the rptdesign you need to run that rptdesign file with the BIRT runtime. The BIRT runtime is now responsible to open that file, query the data mentioned in the rptdesign and built the final output file containing all the data.

This means:
a) your user can simply view the result PDF or HTML if you create these reports somewhere on a PC and sent the resulting PDF or HTML file to them. The user is not able to view a rptdesign file as PDF or something else without going through the BIRT runtime (the browser won't even understand what to do with a rptdesign file). In addition it is very critical to sent rptdesign files to your endusers because they most likely contain database credentials and so on.
If you sent a PDF file to your users you have to keep in mind that the hyperlinks (drill through links and so on) in the document are built by the BIRT runtime on the server and won't work because they much likely point to some directory on that server/PC which is not accessible. Same applies to HTML documents that have images: You have to make sure that these images are transferred to the enduser too (there are multiple solutions...let me know if you want to know about them)

The simplest way is to install the ready to use BIRT Webviewer. The BIRT Webviewer is a webbased application written in Java that integrates the BIRt runtime. You simply put any report in a special directory on the server running this application. After that you can call a url on that server to make it generate and present the report in any output format. The server will take care that all files (images in HTML) are available and will show up in the generated HTML page. The BIRT WebViewer can be deployed to any java servlet container. The most popular one is most likely Apache Tomcat, but there are a lot of other Webserver too like JBoss, Websphere, and so on.
The WebViewer needs a servlet container, that's why it won't run on a simple Apache Webserver.