About custom emitters
In Actuate BIRT Designer Professional or Interactive Viewer, you can choose to render BIRT reports in several different formats, as shown in Figure 49‑1.
Figure 49‑1 Rendering formats
Actuate provides out-of-the-box report rendering for the following file formats:
*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, that also supports the ISO 14289-1 standard for Universal Accessibility
*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 BIRT Visualization Platform 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 BIRT Visualization Platform. 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. Actuate BIRT Visualization Platform for iHub displays 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.