Chapter 3. The BIRT Environment and First Report

Now that we have BIRT installed BIRT, what next? We have heard so many great things about the BIRT Report Designer and are eager to jump into creating some reports. For someone who hasn't worked with eclipse or BIRT, the BIRT Designer can look a little intimidating and, in some cases, we may not even see the BIRT Designer on first run. That's fine. In this chapter, we will get acquainted with the BIRT working environment—also known as the BIRT Perspective in Eclipse Lingo—and get started with creating a basic report.

A basic scenario

When I teach people about development topics of any sort, I like to use scenarios. This book will be no different. The scenarios provide a basic context for the learner to relate the topic information to, and hopefully help in facilitating information retention.

So, in this chapter we will look at a simple scenario in order to get us started with our first report. Assume you work for a toy company called Classic...