Customer Reviews

BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting

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"BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting" is a great tutorial for learning how to use BIRT. BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools" is described including its relationship to Eclipse. After covering how to install BIRT, the book goes into great detail on how to use the report designer.

The target audience should be familiar with HTML, SQL and JavaScript as stated in the introduction. The book describes functions used, but you are expected to know the basic syntax.

As expected, the book covers how to use each of the features of BIRT. They are all described with step by step instructions. There are also a few tutorials walking you through the process from start to finish. I liked the "how to" style for tasks.

The book includes tips on how to plan a report and what to consider. It also includes common code snippets that you may want to use and lists available functions.

I was particularly impressed with the abundance of screenshots and the excellent glossary. If you are thinking about using BIRT, this book is a valuable addition to your library.

Every once in awhile, I get to review a book on a technology or software package I've not heard of before. That was the case with BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting by Diana Peh, Alethea Hannemann, and Nola Hague. I'm stunned at the quality and depth of this open-source Eclipse reporting tool. Oh, and the book's pretty good, too... :)

Contents:
Part 1 - Installing BIRT: Prerequisites for BIRT; Installing a BIRT Report Designer; Updating a BIRT Installation
Part 2 - Getting Started: Learning the Basics; Planning Your Report
Part 3 - Connecting to a Data Source; Retrieving Data; Binding Data
Part 4 - Designing Reports: Laying Out a Report; Displaying Text; Formatting Report Content; Sorting and Grouping Data; Aggregating Data; Writing Expressions; Filtering Data; Enabling the User to Filter Data; Building a Report That Contains Subreports; Using a Chart in a Report; Displaying Data in Charts; Laying Out and Formatting a Chart
Part 5 - Enhancing Reports: Designing a Multipage Report; Adding Interactive Viewing Features; Building a Shared Report Development Framework; Localizing Text; Glossary; Index

BIRT stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, and it runs on the Eclipse platform. Running as a plug-in or using the Rich Client Platform, BIRT will allow the user to create reports from various data sources like JDBC-enabled databases, text files, and XML files. The authors start out with the basics on how to download and install the software (it's dead simple). Then using a few tutorial exercises and plenty of screen prints, they walk you through the basics of connecting to a data source and building a report. The features available in BIRT seem endless, and I was completely amazed at the quality and depth that the software offers for both simple and complex report generation. Throughout the entire read, I kept thinking about a number of applications I wanted to try this out on. Normally to get something of this magnitude, you have to buy reporting packages that cost thousands. Peh, Hannemann, and Hague have completely twisted my world view when it comes to reporting. Great job!

The only thing that wasn't covered too much was how to roll this out to an end-user base without having to make your audience experts in Eclipse. It seems as if there must be some way to package these reports up to shield the user from the internals. There's a follow-on book that covers integration and extension of BIRT, and I'm hoping that deployment is covered more there. But that in no way takes away from the value and quality of what the authors did here...

This is subject matter that has me excited for some potentially cool applications. If things work the way I hope they will, I'll owe a debt of gratitude to this book...

The book arrived in a timely manner. It was just what I needed. It help me develop reports and graphs that impressed my boss right away. Birt will be very competitive to high cost vendor solutions for business intelligence reporting. Right now it is a sleeper, best kept secret.

Purchasing this book is a great way to reward the authors and publishers. While this may be a noble cause, it is not necessary for you to understand BIRT. The software is so powerful and easy to install and use, that a user guide is not necessary for most developers. After installing BIRT you'll find most of the contents of this book in the Help documents under "BIRT Report Developer Guide -> Field Guide To BIRT". Here's how the TOCs line up:

Book TOC only:
Prerequisites
Installing
Updating
Planning your Report

Book TOC and Help TOC:
Learning the Basics
Connecting to Datasource
Retrieving Data
Binding Data
Laying Out a Report
Displaying Text
Formatting Report Content
Sorting and Grouping Data
Aggregating Data
Writing Expresssions
Filtering Data
Enabling User to Filter
Reports with Subreports
Using a Chart in a Report
Displaying Data in Charts
Chart Layout / Formatting
Designing a Multipage Report
Add Interactive Features
Shared Development Framework
Localizing Text

Help TOC only:
Scripting in Report Design
JavaScript Event Handlers
Java Event Handlers
Scripting Reference

If you would rather read this information on paper than the help documents, I recommend this book. If you can install it and use a help page, don't bother.

So Eclipse is migrating slightly... Hitherto, much of Eclipse was used by programmers. Mostly Java programmers, at that. A very nice development and runtime environment. But this book shows that some Eclipse developers want to extend the scope of who can use Eclipse.

The extensive reporting abilities in this book can be implemented by someone who wants to write a report, that will have tables or graphs derived from some data source, typically a database. Unlike most previous books in this Eclipse series, there is less need for the reader to program. BIRT is more akin to a layout or declarative language, like HTML. Not everyone has the aptitude or inclination to be a programmer. And just as HTML is considered easier to understand than C, say, so too is BIRT to outreach to a broader crowd.

However, BIRT is not quite a complete declarative approach. There is indeed scope for programmatic customisation, using scripting languages. Though the only such language described in the text is JavaScript. Most BIRT users won't have to go to this extent, but it is available for special needs.

Unlike other reporting packages, BIRT's output is written as an XML file, with a particular set of XML tags. Instead of being in a proprietary binary format. Much easier to fit into other processing for some extended workflow, if desired.

The blurb on the back cover is a little intriguing. It says that the authors have a combined 165 years experience in various technical fields. But with 3 authors, that amounts to 55 years each?! Really? Is there some double counting going on?