BIRT 2.5.2 provides a variety of tools to construct reports to analyze data. These include charts, aggregation elements, drill to detail capabilities, nested tables, data cubes and crosstabs. These features are presented very well in the AJAX based viewer when deployed to the web, supporting pagination, table of contents, and exporting of data and contents to other formats. Out of the box, BIRT supports exporting to HTML, paginated HTML, WORD, PDF, PostScript, PPT, and Excel. BIRT also provides an extension point to implement your own emitters. For an example of implementing an XML emitter see Developing an Eclipse BIRT XML Report Rendering Extension or BIRT: Writing an Emitter.

As stated earlier BIRT supports exporting to Excel. The BIRT Excel emitter creates a Microsoft Office XML XLS document that can be opened in Microsoft Office 2003 or greater. To use this feature either add the __format=xls parameter to the BIRT viewer URL or use the AJAX export button.



if you are using the Report Engine API, simply set up a render option for XLS.

                //RunAndRender Task
  IReportRunnable design = null;
  design = engine.openReportDesign("Reports/myreport.rptdesign"); 
  IRunAndRenderTask task = engine.createRunAndRenderTask(design);   
  EXCELRenderOption options = new EXCELRenderOption(); 
  options.setOutputFormat("xls");
  options.setOutputFileName("output/resample/myxls.xls");
  task.setRenderOption(options);
  task.run();
  task.close();

                //or Render Task
  IReportDocument document = null;
  document = engine.openReportDocument("output/resample/myreport.rptdocument"); 
  EXCELRenderOption options = new EXCELRenderOption();
  options.setOutputFormat("xls");
  options.setOutputFileName("output/resample/xlsoutput.xls");
  IRenderTask task = engine.createRenderTask(document);   
  task.setRenderOption(options);
  task.render();

While the XLS output is quite good, some features are not supported. For example new worksheets on page breaks are not created and images and charts are not exported to the XLS. While the team continues to improve the XLS emitter there are some other options for emitting XLS. One of these options is to use the Tribix emitter located on source forge. The Tribix project offers emitters for RTF, PPT and XLS.



If you wish to use just the XLS emitter, download the org.uguess.birt.report.engine.emitter.xls_version and org.uguess.birt.report.engine.common_version plugins and copy them to the plugins directory in your Eclipse install location. You will also need to copy them to the runtime location as well. For example, if you are using the WebViewer this will be the WebViewer/WEB-INF/Platform/plugins directory. You will also need to remove org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.excel.config_version and org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.prototype.excel_version plugins from both locations to replace the out of the box XLS emitters. Restart Eclipse with the –clean option and the Tribix emitter should work. No API changes should be required if you are using the RE API. New worksheets per page and image support should now work.

If you desire more XLS output options take a look at the Actuate XLS emitter that will be available in Actuate BIRT 11 which will be released this fall. It allows exporting charts as either images or as native XLS charts.



It also provides the capability to export formulas using a new scripting language called EasyScript, within the BIRT Expression Builder.





The Actuate BIRT XLS emitter also offers the capability to export BIRT Crosstabs to native XLS Pivot Tables.



If you are interested in trying out the Actuate BIRT XLS emitter take a look at the Acutate 11 Milestone download page located on BIRT-Exchange.