Using repository for report development

<p>Hi,</p><p> </p><p>I am looking for a way to use some kind of repository to manage the development of reports in BIRT. Here is what I am aiming at:</p><p> </p><p>- store the reports at a central place</p><p>- have a synchronized copy of the reports on my local PC</p><p>- work on the local reports and then synchronize them again with the central storage</p><p>- in an ideal world: somehow push the updated reports to the BIRT viewer folder on a Tomcat server</p><p> </p><p>Are there any tools available which I can use to accomplish this or is this maybe already somehow integrated into BIRT?</p><p> </p><p>Regards</p><p> </p><p>Max</p>

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BRM

<p>I would think that all except the last one could be easily accomplished with Dropbox.</p>

kclark

<p>It sounds like your wanting some sort of version control system. I'm not sure about pushing automatically to tomcat though. I use svn on my Ubuntu 13.04 server at the house to manage all of my projects. I even use it to upload copies of examples I write in case I delete them off of my laptop.</p><p> </p><p>What environment are you using on the system you want to store the rptdesigns in? If you're using Linux I'd assume there is some way you could write a bash script to login to svn, check the current file against the version of what you have in your repo, then checkout the newest version.</p><p> </p><p>You could run cron job to check for new versions every n units of time.</p>

kclark

<p>If you're in a linux enviorment you could use a script like this, it might not be the best since I just threw it together real quick but it'll get you started.</p><p> </p><div>#!/bin/bash</div><div> </div><div>while true</div><div> </div><div>do</div><div> </div><div>if [ -d "/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/birt/reports" ];</div><div> </div><div>then</div><div> echo "There is already a working copy, getting the latest and overwriting what we already have"</div><div> svn update /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/birt/reports</div><div>else</div><div> echo "No local copy, checking out for the first time"</div><div> </div><div>fi</div><div> </div><div>sleep 600</div><div> </div><p> </p><div>done</div><p> </p><p><span>This script assumes a few things:</span></p><p> </p><p>1. Your subversion server is hosted on the same machine birt is running on.</p><p>2. You've setup your birt.war to look for reports in /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/birt/Reports</p><p>3. Your subversion repo is located at /var/subversion/Reports</p><p> </p><p>This will allow you to use a subversion plugin in eclipse to checkout any reports hosted on your birt machine. Once you've made your changes you can commit them to your svn server. The script sits in a 10 minute loop so it won't pull the changes for 10 minutes. There are a couple good things about this setup. If you make a change to a report and you need to revert back to another you can view it at <a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://birt.machine.ip/subversion/Reports/?p='>http://birt.machine.ip/subversion/Reports/?p=</a>*VERSION NUMBER*</p><p> </p><p>This also is nice because the reports are hosted on the same machine as BIRT is so there is no need to look at another server.</p><p> </p><p>I'd recommend using svn+ssh to push your reports from eclipse for security reasons. Let me know if you need any more help

</p><p> </p><p>Again depending on how your server is setup you can tell the machine to start this script at bootup. You'll want to make sure to start it after apache and tomcat startup.</p>

Max Bo

<p>I will check out this svn and play a little bit around with it - thanks for the hint!</p>

Max Bo

<p>Thanks for the hint, but Dropbox or any other cloud service is not an option here.</p><p> </p><blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="BRM" data-cid="120202" data-time="1378997236"><div><p>I would think that all except the last one could be easily accomplished with Dropbox.</p></div></blockquote>