Report projects

Earlier in the book, we created a report project that contains the examples we have built so far. But the concept of what a report project is and how to work with them is has not yet been thoroughly covered.

A report project in Eclipse is simply a high-level container that will be used to store all files in a given project. In Eclipse, projects are simply folders, either contained inside of a workspace or linked to an external file system folder or directory outside of the workspace. What differentiates projects from regular folders is a special file inside this folder that defines various properties for the project and which is usually named project name.project. For our general purpose report development, we don't really need to know anything else about this file; simply knowing that projects are just folders that contain all the files related to our project is enough.

Project types are defined when we first create our project. In earlier versions of BIRT, there was only...