An engine is a set of Java APIs that provide basic functionality in a specific domain. BIRT contains several engines, for example, the report engine, design engine, and chart engine. These engines provide several different types of services. A service is a set of Java classes that provide functionality using the API provided from different engines. For example, the generation services use the design engine API and report engine API to generate reports and produce report documents respectively.

The design engine contains the APIs used to validate and generate a report design file. BIRT Report Designer and any custom Java application that generates a BIRT report design use the design engine. The generation services also use the design engine when building the report document. The design engine contains APIs that validate the elements and structure of the design file against the ROM specification.

The BIRT report engine enables XML report designs created by the BIRT Report Designer to be used by a J2EE/Java application. To support this functionality, the report engine provides two core services, generation and presentation.

The report engine provides extensions to support custom report items and custom output formats. The report engine also supports Java application developers who want to integrate powerful report generation and viewing capabilities into their applications without having to build the infrastructure from lower-level Java components.

The BIRT Report Engine API supports integrating the run-time part of BIRT into Java applications. The report engine provides the ability to specify parameters for a report, run a report to produce HTML, PDF, DOC, PS, or PPT output and fetch an image or chart.

The generation service within the report engine connects to the data sources specified in a report design, uses the data engine to retrieve and process the data, creates the report layout, and generates the report document. Report content can be either viewed immediately using the presentation services, or saved for later use. The saved report documents containing snapshot views of data can be retained for use and comparison over time.

The presentation services process the report document created by the generation services and render the report to the requested format and the layout specified in the design. The presentation services use the data engine to retrieve and process data from the report document. The presentation services use whichever report emitter they require to generate a report in the requested format. BIRT has several standard emitters, HTML PDF, DOC, PPT, PS, and XLS. BIRT also supports custom emitters that modify these default formats or deliver new formats.

Extensions to the presentation engine and services provide display capability for chart report items and custom report items.

The chart engine contains APIs to generate charts and associate them with data from a data source. BIRT Report Viewer interprets any chart information in a report design and uses the chart engine to generate the chart specified by the design. Use of the chart engine is not restricted to a BIRT application. Any Java application can use chart engine APIs to create and display a chart.

The data engine provides services to retrieve and transform data. The data services retrieve data from its source and process the data as specified by the report design. When used by the generation engine, the data services retrieve data from the data source specified in the design. When used by the presentation engine, the data services retrieve data from the report document.

The data engine provides two key service types: data access services and data transformation services. The data access services communicate with the ODA framework to retrieve data. The data transformation services perform such operations as sorting, grouping, aggregating, and filtering the data returned by the data access services.

BIRT uses the Open Data Access (ODA) framework provided by the Eclipse Data Tools Platform project to manage ODA and native drivers, load drivers, open connections, and manage data requests. The ODA framework contains extension points that support adding a custom ODA driver. Write a custom ODA driver if you have a data source that BIRT does not support and a scripted data source is not desired. Use of a custom ODA driver may require extending not only the data engine but also BIRT Report Designer. A BIRT Report Designer extension is necessary if the data source requires a user interface component to specify the data set and data source properties.