Tuesday, 11 July 2006

Eclipse BIRT 2.1 Released

In conjunction with the Callisto release, the BIRT team at the Eclipse Foundation has announced the availability of BIRT 2.1. The features in this release are said to expand those of BIRT 2.0 and offer improvements in many areas such as context-sensitive help, charting, data set creation, parameterization, library creation and template development.

Key features of BIRT 2.1 include:

• Charting improvements: a new Bar Stick subtype for Stock Charts, legend auto wrapping, improved interactivity and scripting, marker lines, enhanced axis scaling, etc.
• Improved drill through support: a Hyperlink Editor for the creation of links to other BIRT reports, external content and bookmarks within the same report has been improved to support features such as hyperlinking to a report table of contents entry, discovering of required parameters and drilling to a report document.
• Connection pooling: BIRT 2.1 has expanded on the capabilities of the JDBC Data Source, by adding the option to specify a JNDI Name to look up a data source name service for retrieving a pooled connection.
• Multiple master pages: The report designer has been enhanced to allow multiple master pages within the design. When a page break occurs before an element, this property is checked and if needed the master page is changed. Data Binding within the master pages is now possible as well.
• Enhanced cascaded parameters: Cascaded parameters now support multiple Data Sets. This allows the report designer to define at each subsequent level of the cascade an entirely new query, possibly even from a different Data Source. The nested query can then use the prior parameters within its query to cull the result set.
• Joined Data Set: BIRT 2.1 provides the ability to create a special Joined Data Set that allows the combining of two data sets using Inner and Outer Joins. The new Joined Data Set also supports filtering and computed columns.
• Internalization and accessibility: BIRT 2.1 supplies language packs for translation. Currently twenty-two languages are available.
• Binding Editor: the new Binding Editor in BIRT 2.1 allows more control over how data is bound to a container element, such as a Table. BIRT data container elements are no longer bound directly to a Data Set but are now bound to an intermediate layer.
• Page breaks: Within a Group Editor, it is possible to set page breaks before and after a group. For every group change a new page can be added. This feature supports suppressing the first and last page break. An option has also been included in BIRT 2.1 to allow the group header to be repeated when the page change occurs.
• Miscellaneous: In the area of Data Sets and Data Sources, connection profiles are supported, Scripted Data Sets can now use parameters, Data Set Parameters can set Report Parameters as default values, and the Designer caches the Data Set metadata to allow disconnected report design. A resource path is referenced for libraries and images, which aids in deploying reports to different environments. The BIRT 2.1 Viewer provides a control for Printing of reports.