About custom emitters
In BIRT Designer Professional or Interactive Viewer, you can choose to render BIRT reports in several different formats, as shown in Figure 46‑1.
Figure 46‑1 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, introduced in Windows 7
*XHTML—Extensible Hypertext Markup Language document, the next generation of HTML, compliant with XML standards
*XLS—MS-Excel Document
*XLSX—MS-Excel Document, introduced in Windows 7
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 Information Console 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 Information Console. 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 Information Console for iHub displays the options of each emitter for the user to choose when exporting a report.
For more detailed information about how to develop custom emitters in BIRT, see Integrating Applications into BIRT iHub.