Grid
The Grid component is used to visually arrange components in a BIRT report in a particular layout.
BIRT is not a pixel perfect report design environment. In terms of visual arrangement of elements on a page, BIRT is very similar to static HTML. As such, the way to arrange elements in BIRT reports is to use elements such as the Grid, the Table, and the List. The Table and List components are similar to Grids, except that they are bound to data. In the example used in Chapter 2, Installing BIRT, we already saw an example of a Table component. We will cover these two components in more detail in the next chapter when we learn about data interaction.
In the following exercise, we are going to take a grid component and use it to change the arrangement of the elements we already have in our existing Hello World report. While this won't be the prettiest visual layout, it will effectively demonstrate how to interact with the Grid while designing reports and how it affects report layout.
1. Open...