Creating a BIRT Project
Having installed the BIRT Report Designer, you next create your BIRT project in Eclipse. Select File—>New—>Project—>Other in the Eclipse IDE. In the New frame, select Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools—>Report Project and click on the Next button.
Figure 1. Creating New BIRT Project
In the New Report Project frame, specify a Project Name and click on the Finish button. A window prompts you to open the Report Design perspective; click Yes.
This adds your BIRT Report project to Eclipse.
To a add BIRT Report to the project, select File—>New—>Other—>Busines Intelligence and Reporting Tools—>Report or File—>New—>Report. Click on the Next button in the New frame. In the New Report frame, select the Report Project in which you'll be creating your new report and specify a file name for the report, Catalog.rptdesign for example. Click on the Next button. Select a template on which the report is to be based. The example report in this tutorial is generated from the Blank Report template. Click on the Finish button.
A BIRT Report gets added to the BIRT Report project. The Navigator view displays the BIRT projects and the BIRT Reports. The Palette view displays the different report items you can add to the report. The Data Explorer view displays:
- Data Sources: The different connections from which data is obtained.
- Data Sets: The queries and the corresponding output for the queries.
- Report Parameters: Used to input data to the report from a user prompt.
Defining a Data Set
Select the Data Explorer view. Right click on the Data Sources node and select New Data Source.
Figure 2. Adding New Data Source
In the New Data Source frame, select the 'JDBC Data Source' and click on the Next button. In the Create a New Data Source frame, the driver class and URL are pre-specified. Since you'll be creating a data source from the MySQL database, you'll need to add a JDBC driver. Click on the Manage Drivers button.
Figure 3. Adding the New JDBC Driver
In the Manage JDBC Drivers frame, select the JAR Files tab, if not already selected, and click on the Add button to add a MySQL JDBC driver JAR file. Select the MySQL JDBC driver JAR file to add it to the JAR Files list. Click on the OK button in the Manage JDBC Drivers frame.
In the New Data Source frame, specify the Driver Class: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver. Specify the Database URL as jdbc:mysql://localhost/test. Specify the User Name root. The Root user name does not require a password to be specified. Click on the Test Connection button to test the JDBC connection.
Figure 4. Testing the JDBC Connection
When the connection with the MySQL database is established, you should see a "Connection Successful" message. Click on the Finish button in the New Data Source frame. This adds the datasource to the Data Sources node in the Data Explorer view.
Next, create a Data Set from your example database table, Catalog. In the Data Explorer view, right-click on the Data Sets node and select New Data Set
Figure 5. Creating New Data Set
In the New Data Set frame, specify a Data Set Name and select the datasource you created earlier with the MySQL database. Specify the Data Set Type as SQL Select Query and click on the Finish button. This adds a data set to the Data Sets node in the Data Explorer view.
Next, specify the SQL query for the data set. Double click on the data set node. This opens an Edit Data Set frame. Select the Query node and the Catalog table from Available Items. Specify the SQL query select CatalogId, Journal, Section, Edition, Title, Author from Catalog, and click on OK.
Figure 6. Specifying Data Set Query
This adds the columns specified in the data set query to the data set definition.
To preview the result of the SQL query, double-click on the Data Set node and select Preview Results.
Figure 7. Preview Results
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