Getting Eclipse to output reports in PDF

We read your Dec. 19 story on the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools. We downloaded the latest release and found that the PDF-generation feature you described (and what we were most interested in) seems to be missing. Things seem to work, but we cannot figure out how to generate and print the PDF versions of the reports.

It’s possible that you installed BIRT 2.0, which was released in January. The print icon in BIRT was disabled just before the new release because of report-parameter handling problems that couldn’t be addressed in time for the release.

Even though the print icon is gone, you can still generate PDF copies of the reports for printing by building your own report URL, similar to:

http://myserver:8080/birt-viewer/run?__report= somereport.rptdesign&__format= pdf

The best resource for good information on working with BIRT is the BIRT newsgroup. There have been several discussions lately about generating PDF reports using BIRT 2.0.

You may also want to look at using BIRT 1.0.1 if you find that the PDF workaround in BIRT 2.0 is a real problem. If you stick with BIRT 2.0, be aware of issues reported with report rendering in Firefox 1.5.

Monitor the BIRT newsgroup to stay up to date with how best to work with the reporting system.