Emitter pagination not working in Eclipse PDE

Hi, 
 
I've written an emitter (<a class='bbc_url' href='https://bitbucket.org/yaytay/spudsoft-birt-excel-emitters/overview'>SpudSoft Excel emitter</a>) and I'm in the process of making it support page-break pagination. 
I've made changes to the emitter and if I deploy it to a new instance of Eclipse it paginates correctly. 
But when I run my unit tests I'm not getting any extra calls to startPage/endPage (just one at the beginning of the report and one at the end). 
It's as if the environment that is running the unit tests has not picked up the changes to the plugin.xml. 
 
Does anyone know how I can get the PDE to pick up these changes? 
 
Thanks 
 
Jim

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Yaytay

Ahah, finally debugged my way to a solution:

It seems that most of the rendering in BIRT is done via an HTML layer (certainly PDF and custom emitters seem to go through the HTML layer).
Within that layer it checks the pagination requirements of the emitter, but, because the pageBreakPagination is not much use to HTML it has to be explicitly requested.

Hence, to make a page-break-pagination emitter work one has to specify the htmlPagination option: renderOptions.setOption( HTMLRenderOption.HTML_PAGINATION, Boolean.TRUE );

Yaytay

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'Yaytay'" data-cid="84588" data-time="1319719657" data-date="27 October 2011 - 05:47 AM">
renderOptions.setOption( HTMLRenderOption.HTML_PAGINATION, Boolean.TRUE ); </blockquote>
 
Actually, that's wrong

If I set HTML_PAGINATION it changes it so large reports have paper-size pagination, which I absolutely don't want. 
Also, HTML_PAGINATION isn't set by another instance of eclipse - so there is a significant difference between how the report designer is processing these reports and how the Report Engine API processes them. 
 
All very odd <a class='bbc_url' href='http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/forum/public/style_emoticons/'>http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/forum/public/style_emoticons/</a><#EMO_DIR#>/confused.gif 
 
 
It looks like the only way pageBreakAfter is followed is if HTMLAbstractLM.canPageBreak returns true, and that will never return true if HTMLLayoutContext.allowPageBreak returns false, and that is set in HTMLReportLayoutEngine.layout based on RenderTask.needPagedExecutor. 
And needPagedExecutor either tells it to do paper-size paging or turns off paging altogether.

Yaytay

I've finally come to the conclusion that it's a bug in BIRT.
The difference between my unit tests and running the report from the designer is that the designer uses a RunAndRender task, whereas my unit tests have separate Run and Render tasks.
The code for the RunAndRender task is completely different from that for the Render task and results in a different default value for pagination for page-break-pagination emitters.

I filed the bug here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=362245