About the BIRT Report Engine API
The BIRT Report Engine supports report generation and rendering in several different environments, such as:
Stand-alone engine
A Java developer uses a stand-alone engine to render a BIRT report from an existing report design (.rptdesign) file. In this environment, the Java developer creates a command line application to write a complete report in any of the supported formats.
BIRT report viewer
BIRT Report Designer uses the BIRT report viewer to view a report as paginated HTML. The BIRT report viewer is a web application that runs in the Tomcat Application Server, which is embedded in Eclipse. This viewer contains an embedded report engine.
Custom report designer with an embedded engine
A custom desktop reporting application integrates the BIRT Report Engine for the purpose of previewing the report.
Web application that embeds the engine
A web application similar to the BIRT report viewer can use the BIRT Report Engine to generate a web-based report.
The BIRT Report Engine supports running and rendering reports in these diverse environments. It does not perform environment-dependent processing such as URL construction, image storage, and design file caching. The application using the engine API must provide such context information to the engine.
The BIRT Report Engine API consists of interfaces and implementation classes that support integrating the run-time part of BIRT into an application. The API provides task classes that support the following operations:
Discovering the set of parameters defined for a report
Getting the default values for parameters
Running a report design to produce an unformatted report document
Running a report design or report document to produce any of the supported output formats
Extracting data from a report document