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hvbtup edited this page Aug 4, 2020 · 1 revision

What is this?

This is a fork of Eclipse BIRT. To be precise, it is a fork of https://github.com/flugtiger/birt, which is a fork of the official Eclipse BIRT repository at https://github.com/eclipse/birt.

The Eclipse BIRT project is a top-level Eclipse project (see https://www.eclipse.org/birt). As its name says, it is a Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool.

Why this fork?

In my case, in our company are only using the "reporting" style: We are using BIRT to connect to an Oracle database, collect and aggregate data and create printable reports - most of the time in PDF format, but sometimes also Microsoft Excel or Word files.

Since the official Eclipse site seems a bit abandoned since about 5 years, we finally gave up waiting for improvements or bug fixes to make it into the next release and decided to have our own open source repository.

The goal is to have a reliable solution for "classical" JDBC database reporting.

So this fork concentrates on those features which we actually use:

  • Fetching data from an Oracle database (or more general: from a JDBC database)
  • Creating PDF output
  • Creating Word output
  • Creating Excel output

Other features like charting or other data sources have low priority here. to have a look at https://stackoverflow.com.

Notable differences in comparison to the "official" BIRT

This fork contains some features which are not available in the official repository. So some of your reports might look a bit different when you are using this version.

The differences are explained on this page: Notable Differences

Further information

For building the binaries yourself, please see the Wiki pages at https://github.com/flugtiger/birt.

For creating BIRT reports, there's plenty of information in the internet. Howver, quite often hyperlinks are outdated. For specific questions, https://stackoverflow.com is usually a good address.