Until recently I was using BIRT 2.5.1. There were no any issues with 2.5.1 that I faced except for one.
One of the reports that I designed had to support normally 100K+ rows. We know excel 2003 cannot display more than 64k rows. Well I could see some care taken to this fact by the xls emitter as it was trying to split the excess records into a new sheet, but it wasn't able to do it successfully.
The generated file wouldn't open up in excel. Upon referring to the error log file, I came to know that some tags in the xml file (the xls output) were not closed properly. These tags were workbook, worksheets, etc... The next obvious thing I could do was to manually close these incomplete tags and see what the output looked like. Yes the output had excess rows in a new sheet, however some of the records after 64k th record were not written in the file. In short, some records also were missing along with the missed tags.
Upon valuable advices from BIRT Gurus in the forum, I decided to upgrade to BIRT 2.6.0.
With the same test data and a slight modification in the report engine instantiation code, i.e. a very specific emitter for xls EXCELEmitter is available which can be used, I could see the report coming up beautifully on as many sheets required. There were no missing tags and the output had all the rows as that in source.
Though this problem was solved, there were slight changes in the font sizes. Small/Medium/Large... in BIRT 2.5.1 and BIRT 2.6.0 interpret different sizes. If it is intended to preserve the same formatting for a design that could be run in different or later versions of BIRT, I would suggest to use specific sizes like 8pts/10pts... instead of Large/Medium..
Still there is one more feature that is very much requested in later versions of BIRT, at least from my angle. This feature is to be able to explicitly instruct BIRT to split its xls output in multiple sheets and also a support for xlsx format.
I have requested for an enhancement in the eclipse community for this.
Please follow this link to review and vote for this enhancement click here
Any queries please leave a comment.
Disclaimer: This is 100% personal opinion. If it contradicts in any means, the writer requests to be informed.
One of the reports that I designed had to support normally 100K+ rows. We know excel 2003 cannot display more than 64k rows. Well I could see some care taken to this fact by the xls emitter as it was trying to split the excess records into a new sheet, but it wasn't able to do it successfully.
The generated file wouldn't open up in excel. Upon referring to the error log file, I came to know that some tags in the xml file (the xls output) were not closed properly. These tags were workbook, worksheets, etc... The next obvious thing I could do was to manually close these incomplete tags and see what the output looked like. Yes the output had excess rows in a new sheet, however some of the records after 64k th record were not written in the file. In short, some records also were missing along with the missed tags.
Upon valuable advices from BIRT Gurus in the forum, I decided to upgrade to BIRT 2.6.0.
With the same test data and a slight modification in the report engine instantiation code, i.e. a very specific emitter for xls EXCELEmitter is available which can be used, I could see the report coming up beautifully on as many sheets required. There were no missing tags and the output had all the rows as that in source.
Though this problem was solved, there were slight changes in the font sizes. Small/Medium/Large... in BIRT 2.5.1 and BIRT 2.6.0 interpret different sizes. If it is intended to preserve the same formatting for a design that could be run in different or later versions of BIRT, I would suggest to use specific sizes like 8pts/10pts... instead of Large/Medium..
Still there is one more feature that is very much requested in later versions of BIRT, at least from my angle. This feature is to be able to explicitly instruct BIRT to split its xls output in multiple sheets and also a support for xlsx format.
I have requested for an enhancement in the eclipse community for this.
Please follow this link to review and vote for this enhancement click here
Any queries please leave a comment.
Disclaimer: This is 100% personal opinion. If it contradicts in any means, the writer requests to be informed.
