The BIRT Environment and Your First Report
OK, so now you have BIRT installed; what now? You have heard so many great things about the BIRT Report Designer, and are eager to jump into creating some
reports. However, you haven't ever worked with Eclipse or BIRT for that matter. At first glance the BIRT Designer can look a little intimidating, and in some cases you
may not even see the BIRT Designer on your fi rst run. That's OK. In this chapter we will get acquainted with the BIRT working environment, also known as the BIRT
Perspective in Eclipse lingo, and we will get started on creating a basic report.
A Basic Scenario
When I teach people about development topics of any sort, I like to use scenarios.This book will be no different. These scenarios provide a basic context for the learner to relate the topic information to, and hopefully facilitate absorbing the information. In this chapter we will look at a very simple scenario, in order to get us started with our first report. You work for a toy company called Classic Cars. Classic Cars specializes in selling models of classic cars and motorcycles. Classic Cars uses a centralized database for all company operations, such as employee listing, offices,customers, products, and sales history. This information is in a relational database that is stored locally on your machine, as Classic Cars is a small company. Through this chapter, I will walk you through creating your first report, which will be a list of all employees who work for the company. I choose this for a number of reasons. First, it is a fairly simple database query to build and understand. If you are not familiar with the SQL language—don't worry—I will provide the queries that you will use. However, I highly recommend getting some basic familiarity with database concepts, and SQL in particular.
In walking through this report, I will introduce you to the BIRT working
environment, and show you where to get access to the various portions of the BIRT
Designer. Finally, I will show you where you can go through another guided tutorial,
accessible from right within the BIRT environment. You might as well have access to
all available resources for further learning.
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