Introduction to the viewing environments

You can view BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) reports using two web-based viewing environments, Actuate BIRT Viewer and Actuate BIRT Interactive Viewer. In this document, the term, viewers, refers to both Actuate BIRT Viewer and Actuate BIRT Interactive Viewer (Interactive Viewer). A report is a category of documents that presents formatted and structured content from one or more data sources, such as a database, a spreadsheet, or a text file. Figure 1-1 shows a simple listing report displaying credit limit information for customers, sorted by country.

Figure 1-1

An example report

This section describes the viewers and highlights the capabilities and functions of Actuate BIRT Viewer and Interactive Viewer. You use the viewers to navigate a report, print report data, and export the report and report data to several other formats. In addition, Interactive Viewer, as its name suggests, provides a high degree of interactivity. Users can easily modify the layout and formatting of reports, organize report data by sorting, filtering and grouping, perform calculations and compute report data, and edit graphical representations of report data by modifying charts in a report. In addition, you can modify cross tabs, and summary tables in a report. You can then save the modified reports using Interactive Viewer. Detailed information about performing each of these tasks is available in later sections of this document. In cases where you do not see a specific option that is described, upgrade to Interactive Viewer in order to access additional functionality.

A BIRT report can consist of several report components. At the very least, a BIRT report contains a table which holds data. In addition, a report can contain other elements such as charts, Flash charts and gadgets, HTML5 charts, a cross tab, or a summary table.

Users, working with BIRT dashboards to interact with gadgets, such as report gadgets, chart gadgets, Flash gadgets, cross tab gadgets, or summary-table gadgets, can access most menu options described in this document by first maximizing each gadget. For more information on working with dashboards, see Building BIRT Dashboards.

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