Chapter 4. Visual Report Items
The previous chapter looked at the BIRT workspace. One should be familiar with the environment he/she will use to build BIRT reports. This chapter will take a look at each of the individual BIRT report elements, some of their uses, and some of their common properties. By gaining some familiarity with these components, we can save ourselves a fair amount of headache while working with BIRT. A surprising number of questions come up while performing some of the more common functions using BIRT components such as how to format numbers as currency or limit decimal places, and how to format dates, along with a few other questions that can be influenced by using simple BIRT properties.
BIRT report components aren't radically different from other visual components used in other visual development environments and report designers. We have some of our more common visual components such as text labels, data bound text elements, and graphics. For those who are already...
