BIRT Reporting with ERP LN

 

1.       Create a Normal Baan Report

2.       Make a BIRT File (reportcode .rptdesign) of you Baan Report using session ttadv3241m000

3.       You will see the RPT checkbox of the report checked. That means that this report is BIRT enabled. And reportcode .rptdesign is created for it.

4.       Now when you run this report on “WebUI” and select “RPT” as Print Device.

The BIRT Report will get printed.

Advantages of Birt Report:

a)      Eliminates the 255 Character Limitation of Baan Report. (You can Put the Data in the Detail section in multiple lines of the Baan Report and then Edit it on Eclipse Report Designed Perspective.)

b)      Is in XML Format and Can be exported to many file formats

c)       Is Color full and attractive.

5.       To edit the Report Design (i.e. reportcode .rptdesign file) you have to export the  .rptdesign file.

6.       Once a User Exports a file no other user will be able to Export the  .rptdesign file on the same Report.

The 1^st User will Have to Import it back or Do ‘Undo Export’; Only then the next user will be able to Export that file.

7.       Planning Layout of Baan Report so that it is robust to changes:

a)      When the Report is created for the 1^st time add some dummy fields at the end so that we need not convert the report again.

The Birt report will have the label and DataField available when we convert it for the first time.

If we don’t do this then we will have to do Convert Report every time we add a new field to the Report.

Thus we will lose all the editing that we had done before to the BIRT Report Design file.

b)      Now there is a limitation to Point a). i.e. What if the all the dummy fields are used.

Thus to solve this issue we will increase the string size of our last Dummy Field and concatenate our new column to this field.

At the BIRT level we will use code similar to the below code to extract our two columns which is concatenated in the single column.

var lenofstr
lenofstr = BirtStr.indexOf("/",row["detail.1.2.6"])
lenofstr = lenofstr - 1
if (lenofstr > 0)
{
BirtStr.left(row["detail.1.2.6"],lenofstr)
}
else
{
""
}

8.       BIRT Report Editing Tutorials are available on Youtube.

Eg. http://youtu.be/23AZ7Hivzyg