Weave uses BIRT as its default reporting engine for producing printed reports. The reports are built using the BIRT Report Designer application that is part of BIRT and then the report designs produced by the report designer are registered with Weave to make them available for generation by users.

BIRT Report Designer

The BIRT report designer is no longer installed as part of Weave, it is now a separate download.

To start the report designer use the birt.cmd batch file which is installed in the directory where you installed the desginer, do not use the birt.exe that is installed under the birt directory.

Once started you use the File|New|New Report... menu to create a new report design.

You should change the default file location (which is under the BIRT directory by default) by un-checking the "Use default" check box and set the Directory to the Weave workspace directory (or a sub directory of the workspace directory).

The Weave BIRT plugin will look in the Weave workspace directory for report designs by default but it's recommended that you place report designs in a sub folder of the workspace directory, in this case the reports directory, to keep the workspace directory clean and organized.

If you the click the Next button you'll be presented with a screen that allows you to choose a starting template to use for the report. Generally the Blank Report is a suitable starting point.

The Blank Report template does include the current date as part of the Master Page, so it's not entirely blank.

For this sample I'll just add a simple text box to the report since the intent here is to show how to create a BIRT report design, not how to generate a full blown BIRT report.

Once this report is saved the design file will then be available in the ...\weave\platform\workspace\reports directory and should be ready to register in Weave.

Report Registration

Once a report design is available it needs to be registered with Weave to make it available for users. The registration involves adding a new entry to the Weave config file for the report design, and there are two methods of performing the registration, either with a separate entry for each report design or as a single entry for a directory of report designs.

The later makes it easier to register a bunch of reports but the former provides more control over individual report registrations.

To create either type of report registration requires the setting of the appropriate namespace for the BIRT configuration items in the config.xml file, the namespace for BIRT reports is com.cohga.server.report.birt, so if we include BIRT reports in a separate config file called reports.xml and include that into out main config.xml file then the initial contents of the report.xml file should be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<config xmlns="urn:com.cohga.server.config#1.0" xmlns:birt="urn:com.cohga.server.report.birt#1.0">

</config>

Then within the config tags we can add a new BIRT report entry for our sample report

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<config xmlns="urn:com.cohga.server.config#1.0" xmlns:birt="urn:com.cohga.server.report.birt#1.0">

    <birt:report id="sample" report="reports\sample_report"/>

</config>

Then when we refresh the client the new report should appear in the Report view

and if we generate the report (in this case as HTML) we should get the following output

And that's the basics of how to get a BIRT report into Weave.