BIRT is a set of plug-in extensions that support adding reporting functionality to an application. The BIRT APIs define extension points that support a developer adding custom functionality to this framework. Report developers find the BIRT source code in the Eclipse Concurrent Versions System (CVS) repository.

In the Eclipse installation, the name of a plug-in directory has an appended version number. For simplicity, this guide does not show the version number in the names of the plug-in directories. For example, the guide abbreviates the name of the plug-in directory, org.eclipse.birt.report.viewer_4.3.1.v201309171028, to org.eclipse.birt.report.viewer.

The following sections provide a general description of how to make an extension to a defined extension point in the BIRT release 4.3.1 framework.