find out number of pages before a report renders

I need to find out how many pages will be returned in my output prior to the rendering and if the number of pages is greater than a static number then display a message in the report output instead of rendering the report.

Is this possible?

BIRT version 2.5.1

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mwilliams

Hi cmrdjr,

If you set a limit of rows per page, you can figure out how many rows are in your dataSet and then be able to determine the amount of pages that will be displayed. Hope this helps.

cmrdjr

With this report that approach is not available as these are financial statements where each statement (regardless of its length) is on a single BIRT viewer page.

The user can select any combination of the 8 reports listed below and return them in a variety of ways: by organization (only 8 pages), by account (with a list) - multiple pages, or by account/sub-account (with a list) - even more pages.

Some of the organizations have hundresd of sub-accounts and the reports will not render. In fact they have been known to crash the server that runs our Enterprise Reporting environment. One option that was proposed was to find out how many pages would be rendered based on which reports were chosen and the other parameters entered by the user. If the number of pages was larger than the 'breaking point' number, then return a message in the report output that says they will not be getting a report output with the given parameters they used.

The row count in the sql is not a good indicator because one of the orgs if run by account/sub-account produces over 3000 BIRT pages, but has less than 3000 rows of data returned. The sql completes very quickly but the rendering of the report eats memory and cpu resources. The server admins need to get this resolved because when the memory and cpu are used up the server crashed and must be re-booted. This is not a good option since the server is enterprise wide.

Balance Sheet
Balance Sheet Exec Summary
Income Statement by object code - Year to period
Income Statement by object level - Year to period
Income Statement Exec summary - Year to period

Income Statement by object code - Current period
Income Statement by object level - Current period
Income Statement Exec summary - Current period

Let me know if this is confusing because it is really hard to explain without diagrams.

cmrdjr

Any ideas anyone??

johnw

You need to use a little Java/Javascript trickery to get access to that parameter. This cannot be used to do things like display total pages in a report since the events that you need to put it in happen after presentation layer creation, but for your purposes it should work just fine. Not sure that I ever posted this to the Devshare though. 
 
<a class='bbc_url' href='http://digiassn.blogspot.com/2009/07/birt-using-reflection-to-get-total-page.html'>The Digital Voice: BIRT: Using Reflection to get Total Page Count</a>

cmrdjr

Thanks so much! I will take a look at this. 
 
If you haven't posted this in the DevShare you might want to consider it because there is a contributor of the month contest. 
 
<a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.birt-exchange.org/wiki/DevShare_Contributor_of_the_Month_Contest/'>DevShare Contributor of the Month Contest - BIRT Wiki - BIRT Exchange</a>