Running Fully Functional Eclipse BIRT Reports in Pentaho - UPDATE
When I wrote my post about integrating the Eclipse BIRT report viewer in Pentaho almost a year ago, Pentaho was at release 3.6. Since then, 3.7 and 3.8 have been released, and 3.9/4.0 is about to go GA. The biserver's plugin architecture has seen some changes over these releases, causing the BIRT plugin to break.A new plugin is now available, compatible with Pentaho >= 3.6 and BIRT releases 2.6.x and 3.7. The installation instructions remain unchanged, check my original post for reference.
BIRT switched to a jar-based runtime with version 3.7. The default runtime jar, however, does not include the OpenDocument emitters that were also introduced in 3.7. If you want to offer your users the possiblity to export reports to ODF-formats, you’ll need to add some jars to the runtime webapp. All this takes is to copy the necessary jars from the full Eclipse BIRT (designer) download (<ECLIPSE>/plugins/org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.od*.jar and org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.odf_3.7.0.v20110609.jar, timestamps in file names may vary slightly) to <PENTAHO>/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/WebViewerExample/WEB-INF/lib/. Recent BIRT versions also need a commons-logging jar in the classpath. You can copy this file from the <PENTAHO>/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/lib to <PENTAHO>/tomcat/lib or to <PENTAHO>/tomcat/webapps/WebViewerExample/WEB-INF/lib.
In addition to the original post: you can apply security to your BIRT reports by adding the BIRT report file extension (.rptdesign) to the ‘acl-files’ element in /pentaho-solutions/system/pentaho.xml, so it looks something like the element below:
xaction,url,prpt,xdash,xcdf,rptdesign
This plugin is very simple. All it does is tell the biserver to recognice the .rptdesign file extension, and point it to the BIRT report viewer for execution. As simple as it is, I will release the code for this plugin in a couple of days.
