BIRT Report engine as a separate service

kssraju

Recently we are planning to use BIRT Reports instead of using Oracle reports

our existing environment is such that the app server and reports server runs separately

is there any way to start Report Engine on a machine separately and all the clients should use that machine for report processing?

i have seen the java class which starts the engine programetically


we want the report engine as a component or service

any documentation on this (urls or links) will be helpful


Pls let us know how to start the report engine as a independent service

johnw

Yes. I have done this on several occasions. What you are basically doing is creating a servlet class that will start your BIRT environment in the init() method, and it will create a ReportEngine that sits ready to create new tasks. For each doGet/doPost, you will have the ReportEngine create a new task, either a IRunTask, IRenderTask, or IRunAndRender task depending on how you want to handle the processing of your reports. I have also created web services that take requests in via SOAP or JSON strings, processed them using the ReportEngine, and returned either the rendered HTML, or some sort of custom output that would be processed clientside in something like GWT. There are tons of articles and such available in the DevShare on this topic. Also, you can check out Jason Weathersbys book "Integrating and Extending BIRT" that goes into this topic in detail with best practices.

If your looking for an easy way to do this, try out the trial version of BIRT IServer in the download section. It will do all of this and more. Plus, integrating it is very easy with the Javascript API.