Data in a data source can sometimes be cryptic or appear in abbreviated form. For example, gender values may be M or F rather than male or female. Credit rankings may be 1 to 5 rather than excellent, good, average, fair, or poor.

BIRT Report Designer supports the display of alternate values if you do not want to use the original values in a report. You use a data element’s map property to create rules for mapping data values. Create one map rule for each data value you want to replace. For example, to map M and F to Male and Female, respectively, create two map rules.

You can replace a data value with a literal text value. Alternatively, if the report will be viewed in multiple locales, replace a data value with a resource key. A resource key is a text string in an external source that is translated, or localized, into different languages. For information about resource keys and localization, see Localizing Text.