In Actuate BIRT Designer Professional or Interactive Viewer, you can choose to render BIRT reports in several different formats, as shown in
Figure 27‑1.
Figure 27‑1 Rendering formats
Actuate provides out-of-the-box report rendering for the following file formats:
AFP - Advanced Function Printing document format
DOC - Microsoft Word document
DOCX - Microsoft Word document, introduced in Windows 7
HTML - HyperText Markup Language document, a standard format used for creating and publishing documents on the World Wide Web
PDF - Created by Adobe, a portable file format intended to facilitate document exchange
POSTSCRIPT - A page description language document for medium‑ to high‑resolution printing devices
PPT - Microsoft PowerPoint document
PPTX - Microsoft PowerPoint document for Windows 7
XHTML - Extensible Hypertext Markup Language document, the next generation of HTML, compliant with XML standards
XLS/XLSX - MS-Excel Document
If you need to export your document to a format not directly supported by Actuate, such as CSV and XML, you need to develop a custom emitter. Actuate supports using custom emitters to export reports to custom formats. After a system administrator places custom emitters in the designated folder in Information Console or iHub, and registers the emitters with iHub, he must restart the product. Users then are able to use the emitters as output formats when scheduling BIRT report jobs in iHub or exporting BIRT reports in Information Console. Custom emitters are also supported as e-mail attachment formats.
iHub uses the custom emitter format type as a file extension for the output file when doing the conversion. When you develop custom emitters, always use the same name for a format type and an output file extension type. Management Console and Actuate Information Console for iHub display the options of each emitter for the user to choose when exporting a report.
The Integrating and Extending BIRT book, published by Addison-Wesley, provides detailed information about how to develop custom emitters in BIRT.
