Two questions: problem with on-line tutorial, and "unpacking" data from table columns

I've just installed BIRT 2.5.2, and worked through the introductory tutorial. I've got a couple of questions, one about the tutorial, one more esoteric.

First: in the last tutorial lesson I defined a heading for the demo report. Following the instructions, I dragged a 3x2 grid to the heading area. I placed an image in the first row's left column, two lines of text in the middle column, and a date function in the right column. The second row of the grid was empty, but was set to a height of 0.25 inch to separate the heading content from the body of the report.

All fine, except that the body of the report didn't move down to accommodate the grid. The lower part of the first line of text is hidden under the body's column headers, and the second line and the second row of the grid are completely hidden. I've looked for a way to move the body down, or tell BIRT that it should automatically be positioned after the header, but I didn't find anything. What's the trick to this?

Second: I need to produce reports from a database that stores several related items in a single STRING column, like this:

City=St%2E+Louis;State=MO;ZIP=62040;...

Is there a reasonably easy way to make BIRT extract these items, convert the text from URL encoding back to ASCII, and present them in reports?

The alternative is to use a conventional table structure with a separate column for each property. That is feasible, but I'd rather avoid it because it will make adding and changing properties more difficult.

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Comments

mwilliams

Hi jhsachs,

#1: Could you attach a sample report, that shows the first issue, made from the sample database so I know exactly what you're doing?

#2: If you could bring this data in through a scripted dataSource, you could step through the strings and manipulate them how you wanted to. Another way you could do it would be to bring the strings in to a dataSet in BIRT how you are doing currently, then create computed columns to break off the information you want from the large string into their own individual columns.

jhsachs

Sure. Here's a ZIP file containing the .project and .rptdesign file (the entire contents of a directory), and images of the Layout view, the HTML in the multi-line heading, and the Preview view.

Here's another incidental puzzle. Before I put together the ZIP file, I opened the .rptdesign file from the "recent files" list and ran Save As to remind myself of the file's pathname. Instead of opening a Save As dialog box, the command did something (or didn't) without opening any dialog box. Then, when I tried to run Save As again, it was disabled. Does BIRT's Save As command work differently from the usual? This didn't make any sense to me.

mwilliams

jhsachs,

I have not seen this Save As issue before. Not sure why that would have happened for you.

mwilliams

jhsachs,

The issue with your report design is that you have your multi row grid within a single row grid. The single row grid has a height set of 0.33 in or something like that. That is what is cutting off the rest of the header grid info. If you select the outer grid and go to the general tab of the property editor and delete the height value, the grid will expand to fit your data, pushing the "body" table down.

Hope this helps.