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Currently there are a vast amount of RCP applications available to the eclipse community. Many of these applications may record some form of application data. In some cases it may be beneficial to perform some form of analytics and present this information to the end user via a user interface view. Traditionaly, a SWT view would be created to present the application data to the end user. In many cases this view is no more than just a "report" that consists of some tables and charts. With that said there is a huge potential for BIRT as an alternative solution to create these "analytical views". Ideally, the best solution would to create a BIRT viewer that will render the reports in a SWT view. One may notice that the BIRT report designer provides a SWT editor that allows report designers to drag and drop report items to design the layout of the report. At a glance it would seem that it is indeed possible to provide a SWT viewer to render the reports in SWT in a similar way that the SWT editor renders tables and charts. My proposal is too seriously consider extending the existing BIRT report designer to create a SWT view so that RCP applications can effectively make use of BIRT. An alternative, although limiting solution, is to integrate the RCP application with the BIRT viewer. However, there is some limitations integrating the BIRT viewer with the RCP application. One of these limitation is that application data can not be directly passed to the BIRT viewer. For example, consider a case where I have a BIRT report template that uses a scriptable datasource. The scriptable datasource takes in a POJO object that contains the data. Currently there is no way to pass this POJO object to the BIRT viewer. There needs to be a way to pass this POJO object to the session so that the sevlet can get the POJO object.
Sheldon, The WebViewer is a J2EE based application. It happens to run in the Eclipse Tomcat plugin. A utility class is supplied to start, stop and display reports within this app. Would it make sense to expand this Utility class to allow Objects to be placed into the session of this app? Using BIRT script it is possible to access the session object and use it within the report. Jason
My object would have to be serializable.. correct? I am just wondering what happens if I have an EMF object that I want to pass to the report engine. If I put this EMF object in the session would it be serialized? What if my EMF object is huge? I am just considering some memory size implications. Would I have to normalize the EMF object so that it only contains the necessary information I want to report on?
Large Objects may cause a performance problem. Are you using the AddScriptableJavaObject now? Would it be sufficient to add this call to the utility class?
Yes I am currently using the addScriptableJavaObject API. It would be beneficial if I can use this API in the utility class.
