First, you need to reverse engineer from the database to generate Seam entities. You can perform this operation going to File → New → Seam Generate Entities in the Seam perspective. More details on the Seam Generate Entities please read Seam Developers Tools Reference guide). In this guide we will use the Employees table of the DATAMODELS database, which can be downloaded from the Getting Started Guide.

Next you should create a new BIRT report file (File → New → Other → Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools → Report) to represent the data from the Employees table. Call the file employees.rptdesign, and save it in the WebContent folder.

Now switch to the BIRT Report Design perspective.

In the Data Explorer view right-click the Data Source node and choose New Data Source.

Figure 3.7. Creating a New Data Source

The wizard will prompt you to select data source type. Choose Hibernate Data Source and give it a meaningful name, for instance HibernateDataSource. Click the Next button to proceed.

Figure 3.8. Creating Hibernate Data Source

On the next wizard's dialog you can leave the everything with default values, click the Test Connection button to verify that the connection is established successfully.

The Hibernate Data Source enables you to specify a Hibernate Configuration or JNDI URL.

Figure 3.9. Hibernate Data Source Profile

Click the Finish button to complete New Data Source wizard.

Now you need to configure a new Hibernate ODA data set. Launch the New Data Set wizard. In the Data Explorer View right-click the Data Set node and select New Data Set.

Select HibernateDataSource as target data source and type in the new data set name. Call it HibernateDataSet.

Figure 3.10. Creating a Hibernate ODA Data Set

The next dialog of the wizard will help you compose a query for the new data set.

We will make a report that will print all employees in the database who has Sales Rep job title.

select jobtitle, firstname, lastname, email
from Employees as employees where employees.jobtitle = 'Sales Rep'

To validate the entered query you can press the Test query button. All the HQL features like syntax highlighting, content assist, formatting, drag-and-drop, etc., are available to facilitate query composing.

Figure 3.11. Composing query for Data Set

Clicking the Finish button will call the Edit Data Set dialog where you can adjust the parameters of the data set and preview the resulted set. If everything looks good, click the OK button to generate a new data set.

Now you can insert the data set items of HibernateDataSet into the employees.rptdesign file.

You can also use parameters in the query to add dynamics to your report. In the previous example we hard coded the selection criterion in the where clause.

To specify the job title on-the-fly your query should look like this:

select jobtitle,firstname, lastname,email
from Employees as employees where employees.jobtitle = ?

The question mark represents a data set input parameter, which is not the same as a report parameter. Now you need to define an new report parameter to pass the data to the report, call it JobTitle. The dataset parameter can be linked to a report parameter. In the Data Explorer view click the Data Set node to open it and right-click on the data set you created previously (in our case it is HibernateDataSet), choose Edit and navigate to the Parameters section. Declare a new data set parameter, name it jobtitle and map it to the already existing JobTitle report parameter.

You report is ready, you can view it by clicking on the Preview tab of the BIRT Report Designer editor.

You will be prompted to assign a value to the report parameter. For instance you can enter "Sales Rep".

Figure 3.12. Resulted Dynamic Report

The next step is to create a Java class that will store the sortOrder variable and its assessors. The variable will be required to pass dynamic data to the report via report parameters; therefore it has to be of session scope.

The code below shows a simple JavaBean class called ReportJB.

import java.io.Serializable;

import org.jboss.seam.ScopeType;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Name;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Scope;

@Name("ReportJB")
@Scope(ScopeType.SESSION)
public class ReportJB implements Serializable 
{
	private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
	protected String sortOrder = "buyprice";
	
	public String getSortOrder()
	{
		return sortOrder;
	}
	
	public void setSortOrder(String value)
	{
		sortOrder = value;
	}
	
	public ReportJB() 
	{
		
	}
}

The report will print the data from the Products table. Create a new report file file called ProductsReport.rptdesign in the WebContent folder. You can use either the BIRT JDBC Data Source or Hibernate Data Source data source to create the data set for this project. If you want to use the latter please read the previous Section 3.2, “Using Hibernate ODA Data Source”.

The data set should have at least the following data set items: product vendor, product name, quantity in stock and buy price. The data is retrieved from the database with this query :

SELECT productvendor, productname, quantityinstock, buyprice 
FROM CLASSICMODELS.PRODUCTS as products

Make a table in the report and put each data set item into a column.

As it was stated in the beginning of the chapter the report will be dynamic, therefore you need to declare a report parameter first. Call this parameter sortOrder and to add the parameter to the query.

Figure 3.13. Report Parameter

<xml-property name="queryText"><
![CDATA[
SELECT productvendor, productname, quantityinstock, buyprice 
FROM CLASSICMODELS.PRODUCTS as products
]]>
</xml-property>
<method name="beforeOpen">
<![CDATA[
queryString = " ORDER BY products."+reportContext.getParameterValue("sortOrder")+" "+"DESC";
this.queryText = this.queryText+queryString;
]]>
</method>

The report is ready. You can preview it to make sure it works properly.

To set the report parameter you should create an XHTML page, call it ProductForm.xhtml, and place it in the WebContent folder. On the page you can set the value of the sortOrder Java bean variable and click the Generate Report button to open another view page that will display the resulted report.

The source code of the ProductForm.xhtml should be the following:

<!DOCTYPE composition PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<ui:composition xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:s="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib"
  xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
  xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
  xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
  xmlns:rich="http://richfaces.org/rich"
  xmlns:a4j="http://richfaces.org/a4j" template="layout/template.xhtml">
  <ui:define name="body">
    <rich:panel>
      <f:facet name="header">BIRT Report Generator</f:facet>
        <a4j:form ajaxSubmit="true" reRender="criterion"> 
          <table>
            <tr>
              <td>Select sort order criterion:</td>
              <td><h:selectOneMenu onchange="submit()"
              value="#{ReportJB.sortOrder}"> <!-- Bind to your Java Bean -->
              <f:selectItem itemValue="buyprice" itemLabel="buy price" />
              <f:selectItem itemValue="quantityinstock" itemLabel="quantity in stock" />
            </h:selectOneMenu>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>		
      </a4j:form>
      <s:button
        view="/#{!empty reportParameters.order ? 'Products' : 'ProductsReport'}.xhtml" id="generate" value="Generate Report" /> 
        <!-- If the sertOrder variable is not set the button won't work -->
    </rich:panel>
  </ui:define>
</ui:composition>       

The logic of the file is quite simple: when the sort order criterion is selected the value of ReportJB.sortOrder is set automatically via Ajax, and the report is ready to be generated.

Now you need to create the web page that will print the report. Name the file ProductsReport.xhtml. The file to output the report should have the following content:

<!DOCTYPE composition PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<ui:composition xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
	xmlns:s="http://jboss.com/products/seam/taglib"
	xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
	xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
	xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
	xmlns:b="http://jboss.com/products/seam/birt"
	xmlns:rich="http://richfaces.org/rich" template="layout/template.xhtml">
	<ui:define name="body">
		<rich:panel>
			<f:facet name="header">Products Report</f:facet>
			<b:birt designType="embed" designName="products.rptdesign"
				embeddable="true" masterpage="true">
				<b:param name="sortOrder" value="#{ReportJB.sortOrder}" />
			</b:birt>
		</rich:panel>
</ui:define>
</ui:composition>

As you know from Section 3.1, “Adding BIRT Functionality to Standard Seam Web Project”, before using the BIRT Integration framework tags on the page you need to declare the tag library and specify the name space with this line:

	xmlns:b="http://jboss.com/products/seam/birt"

To set the sortOrder report parameter add this line:

<b:param name="sortOrder" value="#{ReportJB.sortOrder}" />

We bound the sortOrder report parameter to Java Bean variable value="#{ReportJB.sortOrder}" using EL expression, with the ReportJB.sortOrder variable having its value assigned in the ProductsForm.xhtml file.

Deploy the project onto the server and open your browser to see the report is successfully generated. You should navigate to http://localhost:8080/yourProjectName/ProductForm.seam to select the criterion and press the Generate Report button. You will be redirected to http://localhost:8080/yourProjectName/ProductsReport.seam.

Figure 3.14. Dynamic Report