About providing data to a BIRT design
Report Studio accesses data for BIRT designs from a variety of data sources, including databases, text files, and XML documents such as other BIRT design or document files. Every report you create in Report Studio is based on a template. A theme in a template helps you personalize your BIRT design to show a particular background and custom color and font settings for various elements. Report developers provide templates and themes that enable reports to have a consistent appearance across functions in an organization. The following document describes the primary sources Report Studio uses to access data and present it in a report.