CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm not fully up to speed on some of the details of how we're going to distribute/deploy the "starter" reports. However, I'm pretty sure that your host will will need to offer Tomcat or some other similar platform, along with the BIRT Viewer app. This article looks like a decent overview (altho I can't vet it's accuracy):

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/07/26/deploying-birt.html

One of the benefits of BIRT is that folks will be able to create their own reports using the Report Designer - and the requirements for that are a bit different. You'll need either the Eclipse environment or the standalone BIRT Report Designer.

We'll be able to discuss / document this a bit more as we get closer to the release... and we'll be looking for folks to try things out early in the release cycle so we can all get more experience with deployment/install requirements and issues.

Finally found some time to look at BIRT. For anyone else interested this is how I got to a locally working solution on a windows platform.

• Downloaded the full Report Designer Full Eclipse Install from http://download.eclipse.org/birt/downloads/build.php?build=R-R1-2_1_2-200702271000
• Unpacked it locally
• Downloaded the MySQL Connector/J from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/5.0.html
• copied the connector to the eclipse/plugins directory
• Opened eclipse and created a new project and a new report
• To setup the data source click on New Data Source and select JDBC Data Source. You need to install the MySQL driver, to do this click on the Manage Drivers Button, then Add, and browse to the connectors .jar file you just copied to the plugins directory.
• The database url is in the syntax jdbc:mysql://domain/database. Note that on shared hosting you will likely be restricted from accessing your data remotely. You either need to get your host to GRANT SELECT ON database_name.* TO username@your_IP_address IDENTIFIED BY "strong_password"; or for test proposes setup a WAMP environment and use localhost instead.
• Data Sets can then be created by issuing the correct SQL statements against your tables.

My first impressions are that BIRT looks like a very powerful tool but is non-trivial to get your head around. I suspect that once 1.8 hits the streets and we get a feel for what can be achieved there will be more documentation. Certainly a few report examples will empower us to build customisations.

Hope this helps.