BIRT Report Engine provides a data extraction extension point that supports developing a new plug-in for exporting report data to a custom format. The BIRT user interface also provides a built-in data extraction feature that can export data from a report document in CSV format. This functionality is available in the BIRT Web Viewer. The Data Export feature is available in the BIRT Web Viewer toolbar, as shown in Figure 26‑1.
Figure 26‑1 BIRT Web Viewer toolbar
The user can select the data columns for the export, the export format, the data encoding, and other properties using Export Data, as shown in Figure 26‑2.
Figure 26‑2 Export Data menu
A data extraction extension adds a plug-in to the BIRT Report Engine framework by implementing the extension point, org.eclipse.birt.report .engine.dataExtraction. The XML schema file, org.eclipse.birt.report.engine /schema/dataExtraction.exsd, describes this extension point.
The data extraction extension point enables support for new output formats in the presentation engine. The BIRT plug-in registry uses this extension point to discover all supported output formats specified for the report engine environment. The Export Data menu lists the available formats in the Export format list.
The XML data extraction extension in this section provides an example of how to create a data extraction extension.
You can download the source code for the XML data extraction extension example at http://www.actuate.com/birt/contributions. For reference documentation, see the BIRT Report Engine API Javadoc in Eclipse help for the org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.dataextraction and org.eclipse.birt.report .engine.content packages.
