JBoss BIRT Integration User Guide

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 Dev Tools Reference guide). In this guide we will use the Employees table of the DATAMODELS database.

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.

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 2.7. Creating a New Data Source

You can also use parameters in the query to add dynamics to your report. In the previous example we hardcoded 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 2.12. Resulted Dynamic Report

The next step is to create a Java class that will store the sortOrder variable and its assessors, register the class in faces.config.xml. The variable will be needed to pass dynamic data to the report via report parameters, therefore it has to be of session scope.

The report will print the data from the Products table, hence you need to create a report file first. 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 chapter 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  productvedor,

productname,

quantityinstock,

buyprice

FROM 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, let it be sortOrder and to add the parameter to the query. BIRT offers rich JavaScript API, so you can modify the query programmatically like this:

<xml-property name="queryText"><![CDATA[

SELECT  productvedor,

productname,

quantityinstock,

buyprice

FROM 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 view page, call it Products.xhtml. On the page you can set the value of the sortOrder Java bean variable and press the Generate Report button to open another view page that will display the resulted report.

The source code of the Products.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="#{yourJavaBean.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 select the value of yourJavaBean.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="#{yourJavaBean.sortOrder}" />

            </b:birt>

        </rich:panel>

</ui:define>

</ui:composition>

As you know from the Adding BIRT Functionality to Standard Seam Web Project chapter, 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"

The dynamics to the report adds this line:

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

We bound the sortOrder report parameter to Java Bean variable value="#{yourJavaBean.sortOrder}" using EL expression, and the value to the variable is assigned in the Products.xhtml file.

By default if you embed a report into HTML page the HTML-format report contains the <html>, <head>, <body> etc., tags. However if your HTML page already has those tags, you can rid of them using the embeddable="true" attribute of the <b:birt> component.

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/Products.seam to select the criterion and press the Generate Report button. You will be redirected to the http://localhost:8080/HelloBirt/ProductsReport.seam

Figure 2.13. Dynamic Report