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, as 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 designer. 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 to keep the workspace directory clean and organized, it's recommended that you place report designs in a sub folder of the workspace directory. e.g. the ..\workspace\reports directory,

If you the click the Next button, you will be presented with a screen that allows you to choose a starting template to use for the report. The Blank Report is a typical 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 will add a simple text box to the report since the intent here is to show how to create a BIRT report design, and 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 a separate entry for each report design or a single entry for a directory of report designs.

The latter makes it easier to register a number of reports, and 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 our 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>

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>

When we refresh the Weave client, the new report should appear in the Report view

If we now 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.