Newbie Question about data sources

nightgaunt

<p>While BIRT looks to be exactly what I've been looking for in terms of a good report writer for my databases, I'm not adept enough to know if it will meet my other need. Your advice on this would be greatly appreciated. </p><p> </p><p>My current problem is that I've got dozens of files (that I can get in either .txt or .dat format) that I need to pull data from. The .txt versions convert to excel very easily though.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Each row in these files represents a transaction, and I'm interested in one of the columns as it indicates the type of each transaction.</p><p> </p><p>What I really need is a program that will allow me to import these files individually (or as a group preferably), use them as a data source and then allow me use those to create a report on the prevalence of certain transaction types. </p><p> </p><p>BIRT meets my database reporting needs but I'm not sure if it's set up to allow me to use a collection of .txt files as a data source. So can BIRT do that for me or would I need to merge all of the .txt files into a single file (say an excel file) and then use that as my data source. </p><p> </p><p>If my description of the issue seems clumsy I apologize. I'm something of an amateur in this area. </p><p> </p>

mwilliams

You could bring in all of the flat files separately and join them using joint dataSets or by using a scripted dataSet to merge them yourself. Another option could be to look into this ODA plugin submitted in a past contest by a community member:

<a data-ipb='nomediaparse' href='http://developer.actuate.com/community/devshare/_/designing-birt-reports/1503-multi-flat-file-aggregator'>http://developer.actuate.com/community/devshare/_/designing-birt-reports/1503-multi-flat-file-aggregator</a&gt;