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How to paginate when HTML preview is triggered in BIRT RCP?

callie16

Hi! 
 
Newbie to BIRT here so not sure if I'm posting to the right forum; please let me know if I'm doing this wrong. 
 
Anyway, I've read <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/reportEngineAPI.php'>here</a> that pagination is not possible when using RunAndRenderTask; it should be the separate RunTask and RenderTask to achieve this, correct? 
 
Now, the thing is, we're using BIRT RCP and we cannot implement a separate WebViewer due to our requirements. While I was tracing, however, I noticed that the RCP app uses RunAndRenderTask when I preview the report as HTML. Also, the viewer used is /preview. If I understood <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/viewerUsage2.2.php'>this</a> right, for me to get the separated Run & Render tasks, I should be using /frameset. 
 
So, my question is, for BIRT RCP, is there a way to paginate the HTML preview without implementing a separate WebViewer? In short, can I somehow force the base RCP to paginate the HTML in HTML preview? If so, how do I get to the separate Run & Render tasks or use /frameset? I'm not very knowledgeable about emitters and I'm still trying to understand how the HTML emitter was implemented. 
 
My question is similar to the one <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/forum/index.php/topic/16820-how-to-set-pagination-for-reports-formathtml-in-eclipse-birt/page__hl__html pagination__fromsearch__1'>posted here</a>, but, like I mentioned, we cannot implement a separate WebViewer... 
 
Any help would be appreciated! 
 
Thanks in advance!

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CBR

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' >Anyway, I've read <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/reportEngineAPI.php'>here</a> that pagination is not possible when using RunAndRenderTask; it should be the separate RunTask and RenderTask to achieve this, correct?</blockquote>
 
Correct! 
 
<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' >
Now, the thing is, we're using BIRT RCP and we cannot implement a separate WebViewer due to our requirements. While I was tracing, however, I noticed that the RCP app uses RunAndRenderTask when I preview the report as HTML. Also, the viewer used is /preview. If I understood <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/viewerUsage2.2.php'>this</a> right, for me to get the separated Run & Render tasks, I should be using /frameset.</blockquote>
 
Also correct. The WebViewer is using run and then render if you are calling it using the frameset servlet. The preview servlet is using the run&render and in addition it sets a maximum number of rows that are considered to be in the report. Using the preview serlvet can cause wrong results in your report if your query returns more then 500 rows! Therefore I would never use it to generate a report. It is only meant to be used as a preview of the final report with less data. 
 
What i do not understand is how you have integrated BIRT. Are you using the default webviewer or are you working directly using the report engine api? If you are using the default webviewer plugin why not simply calling frameset? It will take care of the pagination.

callie16

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'cbrell'" data-cid="113553" data-time="1359037282" data-date="24 January 2013 - 07:21 AM">
What i do not understand is how you have integrated BIRT. Are you using the default webviewer or are you working directly using the report engine api? If you are using the default webviewer plugin why not simply calling frameset? It will take care of the pagination. </blockquote>
 
Thanks for the reply! Much appreciated, I was able to switch now to /frameset after digging deeper into the codes. 
 
Actually, we're exploring the RCP application since we've only begun with this type of tech (i.e. Eclipse RCP). Hence, we've extended/customized the current BIRT RCP application. Unfortunately, I can't understand everything at once so it's been a little bit of a challenge to trace the codes. 
 
At the moment, although we've managed to switch to /frameset, we can't seem to figure out how to set the page range. Well, I've tried setting it at the render task (which is how I'm seeing samples set it) but it seems like the app is disregarding it. Any pointers for this as well? 
 
Thanks!

CBR

hi,

no problem. I m happy to help new people trying to explore and play around with BIRT. And you seem to understand things quick.
Eclipse RCP is really complex. If you have to learn it from scratch it is a real pain.
Would you mind showing some pieces of your code? I m only interested in how you interact with BIRT.

I m assuming that you are using the webviewer and you do not need to interact with the engine directly. The webviewer is a JavaEE webapp that is beeing used on server deployments. In addition the BIRT project uses it to generate reports within eclipse. It is kind of a smart idea:
Inside eclipse they are running a servlet container (it is apache Jetty if you are interested in the details). The Webviewer.display(...) method only opens a browser window (or widget if it is embedded in a eclipse view) and sets its URL to point to the webviewer applicatation running inside jetty. The webapp knows what to do using the URL get parameters. Using that mechanism you never interact with the engine directly.
I m assuming that there is some parameter that you can set in Webviewer.display to set the correct GET parameters in that URL. The parameters are described over here: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/viewerUsageMain.php#parameters

I m quite sure you can set all of these using Webviewer.display. But i m still not 100% sure how you integrated it? Is it using the same mechanism i described? If you share some code i can identify the mechanism.

callie16

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'cbrell'" data-cid="113734" data-time="1359559043" data-date="30 January 2013 - 08:17 AM">
hi, 
 
no problem. I m happy to help new people trying to explore and play around with BIRT. And you seem to understand things quick. 
Eclipse RCP is really complex. If you have to learn it from scratch it is a real pain. 
Would you mind showing some pieces of your code? I m only interested in how you interact with BIRT. 
 
I m assuming that you are using the webviewer and you do not need to interact with the engine directly. The webviewer is a JavaEE webapp that is beeing used on server deployments. In addition the BIRT project uses it to generate reports within eclipse. It is kind of a smart idea: 
Inside eclipse they are running a servlet container (it is apache Jetty if you are interested in the details). The Webviewer.display(...) method only opens a browser window (or widget if it is embedded in a eclipse view) and sets its URL to point to the webviewer applicatation running inside jetty. The webapp knows what to do using the URL get parameters. Using that mechanism you never interact with the engine directly. 
I m assuming that there is some parameter that you can set in Webviewer.display to set the correct GET parameters in that URL. The parameters are described over here: <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/viewerUsageMain.php#parameters'>http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/viewerUsageMain.php#parameters</a> 
 
I m quite sure you can set all of these using Webviewer.display. But i m still not 100% sure how you integrated it? Is it using the same mechanism i described? If you share some code i can identify the mechanism. </blockquote>
 
This is great, thanks! I seriously appreciate the time and the help

Actually, it's not my first time doing Eclipse RCP but this (BIRT) is seriously a whole new level for me so it's kinda hard to digest everything the first time I'm looking around. 
 
At the moment, I'm actually exploring BIRT itself. I was about to share the codes except I think I figured out the problem; in the RenderTask object that was created, the HTML_PAGINATION variable was set to *true* when it should have been *false*. LOL. When I did this (and, say, set the page range from 1-5), the HTML preview rendered the first 5 pages in a single view/page. So I guess that's right?

And (so sorry, more questions!) it brought me to a follow-up question... if what I did was right... 
 
Since RunTask and RenderTask are separated, the report and its datasource gets processed first in RunTask (to get the total number of pages, etc.) *before* it gets to RenderTask... where the pagination is, correct? If so, would there be a way to also, well, paginate the design/datasource being processed in the RunTask as well? This is because when I put the navigation bar in the WebViewer, I noticed that the total # of pages was not the page range (i.e. 5) but, instead, was the original # of pages when I ran the report without pagination. 
 
I was thinking of pre-processing the design/datasource each time the "page range" is set but I can't seem to figure out how to update the datasource before it's loaded... not to mention that the pre-processing itself might be expensive in terms of processing time. Thoughts on this? 
 
Again, thank you so much, I'm learning quite a bit here!