Designing a business process model report using the BIRT report designer

You can create a customized report on a business process model using the BIRT report designer, an Eclipse-based open-source reporting system that is included as part of the ActiveVOS.

Using BIRT, you can add a variety of reports to your application.

• Lists—The simplest reports are lists of data. As the lists get longer, you can add grouping to organize related data together (orders grouped by customer, products grouped by supplier, etc.). If your data is numeric, you can easily add totals, averages, and other summaries.
• Charts—Numeric data is much easier to understand when presented as a chart. BIRT provides pie charts, line & bar charts, and much more. BIRT charts can be rendered in SVG, and they support events to allow user interaction.
• Crosstabs—Crosstabs (also called cross-tabulation or matrix) shows data in two dimensions: sales per quarter or hits per web page. (Crosstabs are not yet in Release 2.1.2, but are planned for the 2.2 release.)
• Letters & Documents—Notices, form letters, and other textual documents are easy to create with BIRT. Documents can include text, formatting, lists, charts, and more.
• Compound Reports—Many reports need to combine the above elements into a single document. For example, a customer statement may list the information for the customer, provide text about current promotions, and provide side-by-side lists of payments and charges. A financial report may include disclaimers, charts, and tables, all with extensive formatting to match corporate color schemes.

Designing a new report

The BIRT report designer supports a variety of data sources: XML, JDBC data sources, and text files. Use the XML data source for designing a business process model report. Please consult the BIRT developer’s guide included in the product for details.

• From the Business Process Model perspective, select Modeling -> Report to generate an intermediate XML file from the model. You will need to specify the file name when creating the data source.
• Switch to “Report Design” perspective and create a new report.
• Create an XML data source.
• Refer to the BIRT Developer’s Guide for instructions on designing reports.