BIRT报表设计：实战数据解析与报告

需积分: 9 49 浏览量更新于2024-07-25 收藏 11.23MB PDF 举报

"Birt报表设计英文文档，一份用于学习BIRT（Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools）的开源基于Eclipse系统的实用数据分析和报告工具的英文资料。该文档由John Ward撰写，旨在帮助用户快速设计和创建报告，同时提升英语阅读能力。" 在《Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT》这本书中，作者深入浅出地介绍了如何利用BIRT系统进行高效的数据分析和报告制作。BIRT是一个强大的开源工具，它允许开发人员集成到他们的应用中，以生成各种类型的报表，包括表格、图表、图形以及自定义格式的报告。该文档对于那些希望提升报表设计技能，同时提高英语水平的人来说，是一个宝贵的资源。书中的内容可能涵盖了以下几个关键知识点： 1. **BIRT概述**：介绍BIRT的基本概念、架构和组成部分，包括报告设计器、运行时环境和数据访问层。 2. **安装与配置**：详细解释如何安装BIRT开发环境，包括Eclipse IDE插件的安装和设置，以及如何配置数据源。 3. **数据模型设计**：讨论如何创建和管理数据集，使用SQL查询从关系数据库或其他数据源提取数据。 4. **报告设计**：讲解报告布局、样式和模板，以及如何使用BIRT提供的元素如表格、图表、文本框等创建专业报表。 5. **表达式和脚本**：介绍如何使用BIRT的表达式语言进行计算和逻辑处理，以及在报告设计中应用JavaScript脚本来实现更复杂的功能。 6. **参数和过滤器**：说明如何添加用户输入参数，以及如何使用这些参数来动态过滤报告数据。 7. **钻取和交互性**：讨论如何在报告中实现数据的多级钻取和交互功能，以增强用户体验。 8. **发布和部署**：涵盖如何将报告部署到服务器，以及如何通过Web界面或者嵌入到其他应用中访问报告。 9. **性能优化**：提供关于如何优化报告加载速度和处理大量数据的策略和技巧。 10. **最佳实践和案例研究**：分享实际项目中的经验和案例，帮助读者理解和应用所学知识。这本书的目的是帮助读者不仅理解BIRT的技术细节，还能掌握实际应用中的最佳实践。尽管是英文文档，但通过学习，不仅可以提升技术能力，还能锻炼英语阅读和理解能力，是一份双重收获的学习资料。

Introduction

At present, it's a very interesting time for open-source software. No longer is it a

novel concept put forth by enthusiasts; new functionality is included into software

that is changing our lives, and a lot of it is built on open-source technology. Having

been an open-source advocate for some time now, I have seen a phenomenal amount

of change and progress in the quality and quantity of Open-Source Software (OSS)

projects. From the thoughtful minds of professional software developers, engineers,

and hobbyists, tools have sprung up to support any discipline, from programmers

to authors, ofce staff, teachers, students, media, and graphic designers. Where once

there was only expensive proprietary commercial software to do particular tasks,

now there are a whole handful of new and free alternatives based on OSS.

Open-source projects start—and also die—all the time. Each project starts to address

what a user, or group of users, perceives as a relative shortcoming in the current

computing landscape. OpenOfce.org was derived from StarOfce to address the

lack of an open-source Ofce suite. Mozilla has grown from the ashes of Netscape to

compete with IE (Internet Explorer), which led to the creation of Firefox—it has not

only provided an alternative to IE but has also revitalized the browser wars, even

garnering attention to its commercial competitor, Opera. Also, there is no end to the

innovations that Perl and PHP have brought about.

Even non-free software benets from OSS. Iterations of Microsoft Windows have

utilized versions of FreeBSD-based implementations of the TCP-IP stack, for their

network implementations. Commercial routers from companies like Linksys

have embedded Linux in them; even gamers are affected, for example the Sony

PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii are both designed to run Linux.

However, there has always been an area that is severely lacking, and that is the

area of business intelligence. While there are solutions such as writing Perl or PHP

scripts, these really don't leverage full-edged business intelligence (the idea that

reports and tools can be used by businesses to make strategic decisions, based on

short-term and long-term data and trend analysis). There has not been an open-source

Introduction

[ 6 ]

tool that really addresses this shortcoming. Crafty developers can take the long

approach and write out scripts and programs that automate data reporting tasks,

but this is a long and complicated process. Proprietary software for doing reporting

tasks has been around, such as the report developer inside Microsoft Access for

reporting of Access databases or Crystal Reports. These are tools that have been

built to automate reporting tasks—such as data retrieval, sorting, aggregation, and

presentation—into a format that is meaningful to the user. These kinds of tools have

been lacking in the open-source community, and have only begun to gain speed in

the last few years.

Introduction to Business Intelligence

There are two major questions if you are reading this book that need to be answered

at this point. What is business intelligence, and why do we need it? Business

intelligence is a lot like many other technology buzzwords that get thrown around;

many people say it, and many people will give you a complicated denition of it.

However, the answer is really quite simple.

If I had to give it a formal denition I would say that business intelligence, as it relates

to information technology, is any tool or method that allows developers to take data

or information, process it, manipulate it, and associate it with related information and

present it to decision makers. As for a simplied denition, it's presenting information

to decision makers in a way that helps them make informed decisions.

Consider this scenario: You are a manager for a chain of retail stores. You need to

gure out what products you should push to the forefront for the upcoming holiday

season. You have a two-method approach: First you get the latest buzz from your

marketers, who tell you what the new and upcoming products are; your second

approach is to look at products that have traditionally sold very well.

In order to project how the current year may go, you need to look at the data

you have available. What product categories have traditionally sold well over a

5-year period, or even a 10-year period? Has there been any sort of patterns to these

sales gures? What individual items have sold well in that period? Are there any

trends? When you look at these gures, can you give a projection on how well these

products will do? What items should be put on sale in order to push for higher sales?

These are the kinds of questions that a decision maker may need answered.

So the rst step in the process is getting to this data, usually located in some place

like a data warehouse. If you are looking at a regional level you may have this

information stored separately in a localized data mart, with specic data. If you are

looking at up-to-the-minute information: you may need access to transactional data.

Either way, the rst hurdle is getting access to the data.

Chapter 1

[ 7 ]

What do you do once you have access to the data? How do you best format and

present the data in some meaningful fashion that can be used to assist in the BI

(Business Intelligence) process? This is where BI tools come into play. Using BI

tools you have the ability to write reports that can present this oftentimes sporadic

and confusing data, in some sort of format that is useful to decision makers. Once

this data is presented, trends can be identied, total gures can be aggregated, and

decisions can be made.

The Current State of the BI Market

The current state of the BI market is similar to the state of any technology eld. It

can change at the drop of a hat! At the time of this writing, you can divide the major

players in this eld into two categories: commercial offerings and open-source

offerings. Each category has its own benets and drawbacks. With the commercial

offerings, typically you have familiar names such as Actuate and Business Objects,

offering various tools aimed at different levels of business. Some of these tools

are large and enterprise reporting platforms that have the ability to process,

analyze, and reformat large quantities of data. With commercial offerings, you get

product support and years of experience. Oftentimes with the big guys who offer

consultation in developing your reports for a fee, you also get the professional

services. One of the drawbacks of commercial offerings is the large price associated

with them, both in terms of purchasing and in terms of running them. In some

companies, in addition to the initial cost (which can at times be in the thousands of

dollars) there is also a cost of yearly maintenance fees, upgrade fees, cost of licensing,

and cost of ownership that may be typically overlooked. If you are building a

large-scale custom application, are you allowed to integrate these products into your

application? If so, with what restrictions? Finally, the years of engineering behind

a product may leverage an obsolete methodology. Perhaps the technology behind

these products is no longer viable or powerful enough to handle the demands of a

growing enterprise.

Then, you have your open-source offerings. Currently there are three big names in

the open-source reporting realm: JasperReport, Pentaho, and BIRT. Two of these

projects, JasperReports and BIRT, are run by commercial companies who make their

money by doing professional services for these offerings to small scale and private

projects. Again, there are a number of pros and cons associated with open-source

solutions. With open-source, you have full access to the source code of the platform

you choose. This allows you to add in functionality, embed it with your existing

applications, and actively participate in a development community that is oftentimes

very large and around the world. There is little initial cost to open-source software in

terms of purchasing, as open-source is free. The cons are that there is typically a cost

associated with nding individuals who are knowledgeable in open-source.

Introduction

[ 8 ]

Sometimes open-source software is not very user friendly. Finally, often there is little

to no support for open-source products. This is not the case with large open-source

projects, however. With large active development communities, and usually with

open-source projects such as Linux, Eclipse, and Mozilla/Firefox, available answers

are only an internet search away.

The Need for Open-Source Reporting

Some things are better illustrated with a story. So let me begin this with what

brought me to the world of open-source business intelligence. My story starts on

a late Sunday evening in 2001. At that time, I was a student intern for a midsized

network security monitoring operation BATC (Ball Aerospace and Technologies

Managed Network Security). Here I am, landing a dream job for a college student, a

paid internship at a high-technology company, working in one of the most exciting

elds in the tech industry, network security. From this single department came some

interesting projects and concepts such as Sguil (the open-source network security

analysis front end for Snort) and SanCP (a network session proler). Concepts

such as Network Security Monitoring (NSM) were being tested and proven over

security appliances.

In this particular scenario: we are a department dedicated to providing customers

with network security monitoring solutions, using open-source software. This

entire NSM philosophy would later be expanded upon and described in "The Tao

of Network Security" (Bejtlich 2004) yet, here I am, sitting in my cubicle with a

broken keyboard, resting in an ofce where the A/C shuts off on a timer. So it's

boiling hot! All this great technology and cool blinking lights, ashing screens, and

on-the-cutting-edge monitoring of Internet trafc catching bad guys doing bad

things. The whole setup is something right out of a spy movie, with exciting things

happening; such a great opportunity for me, a young college student. Yet, on this

particular evening, I am not enjoying my job.

My job here, this evening, is not to monitor the thousands of alerts; nor is it to

inspect the exponentially higher amount of network packets, in an effort to protect

networks from the insidious under doings of the digital underground. Instead, my

job this evening is to do the most dreaded task in the entire operation: the weekly

incident report.

Being a company dedicated to open-source, we had tons of open-source software

proving that the open-source paradigm was a workable one. Our workstations

were all Red Hat Linux systems, which were congured and customized to help us

achieve our mission statement. Our back-end servers were all running FreeBSD. Our

security console was a custom, in-house developed front-end built on open-source

scripting tools (which was the base for what would later become the Sguil Project).

Chapter 1

[ 9 ]

Our network sensors were all built on Snort, and dumped all transactional data into

a PostgreSQL data warehouse. Our ofce productivity suite was an early release of

OpenOfce.org. Yet we lacked one important piece of a customer-focused service

group: a reporting system.

So, what tools did we use to address the area of reporting? We had scripts. Lots of

tedious, boring, and manual scripts that generated lines and lines of ugly text. The

scripts took hours to run, mostly due to lack of proper indexing on the reporting

tables, because the DBAs refused to listen to us and focused on the transactional

databases that housed all our live data. So the scripts were slow, and their output

was ugly. The scripts may have outputted RTF documents, but no formatting tags

were actually used. Part of our job was to go through each of these reports, cut

out duplicate lines, change fonts and font weighting, and manually go through

and conrm the accuracy of each of the counts in the summary. This was a

time-consuming, tedious, and boring task that was highly error prone: as a result,

it required longer validation time. Of course, due to the setup, the scripts were

considered part of the Database Administrators' and the system developers' tasks;

so we didn't have access to change anything in the event of an issue. If a query was

returning funny results in the reports, too bad, because all we saw was an output

page with no access to the code that generated it.

Now it's the middle of the night, we're tired, the other guy is griping about having

to pick up the slack while I am doing the most tedious task of running the report.

It's hot! I'm going through hundreds of pages of numbers, cutting out duplicates,

changing summary numbers to reect correct counts, and changing the formatting.

I am sitting here asking myself the same question I ask myself each week when we

run these reports: "Isn't there a better way?" This will become a question that always

nags at the back of my mind, and it is one that I will always come back to as an

unresolved question.

Fast-forward a few years. I have since moved on from BATC into a new role as senior

software developer, for Citibank North America's National Training Department. It's

the 2004 Actuate Users Conference in Los Angeles, California. Always on the prowl

for innovative reporting technologies because of my encounters at BATC, I came to

the conference to learn about the different products that Actuate had to offer. But the

one thing that always stayed at the back of my mind was that nagging desire, to nd

an open-source reporting solution. So as a few days rolled on during the conference,

I was getting a little annoyed at one of the product pitches. So on this particular day's

keynote speech, the vice-president of some such department was talking on and on

about all the products that Actuate had to offer. Of course, as I was already starting

to zone out, I started doodling in my notebook with little caricatures of him

doing sales pitches. But suddenly, as if I had a moment of clarity from a drunken

剩余306页未读，继续阅读

「已注销」

粉丝: 0
资源: 10

BIRT报表设计：实战数据解析与报告

birt报表详细中文文档

在birt中使用报表文档

BIRT报表学习手册-中文

BIRT报表开发手册

BIRT报表开发文档

birt报表开发 (二)、birt报表初体验-第一个报表

birt免费报表工具文档及实例

birt报表资料_珍藏.rar

birt报表工具

c语言实现图片转化为 ASCII 图.zip

最新资源