BIRT: Java Program Using BIRT API's to Run a Simple Report

My last article showed how to set up BIRT scheduled tasks without any programming. In this article I will demonstrate the same thing, however the report launching will be done from within a Java program. This demonstrates how to use the BIRT API’s to open, launch a report, and save to a specified location. The output location has been changed to C:\Temp instead of the working directory. Information about using the BIRT API’s was obtained from the BIRT Integration Tutorial. The Source Code is below:

package viewtest2;

import java.util.HashMap;
import org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.*;

public class viewtest2 {

     public static void main(String[] args) {
          //Variables used to control BIRT Engine instance
          EngineConfig conf = null;
          ReportEngine eng = null;
          IReportRunnable design = null;
          IRunAndRenderTask task = null;
          HTMLRenderContext renderContext = null;
          HashMap contextMap = null;
          HTMLRenderOption options = null;
          
          //Now, setup the BIRT engine configuration. The Engine Home is hardcoded
          //here, this is probably better set in an environment variable or in
          //a configuration file. No other options need to be set
          conf = new EngineConfig();
          conf.setEngineHome("C:/birt_runtime/birt-runtime-2_1_0/ReportEngine");
          
          //Create new Report engine based off of the configuration
          eng = new ReportEngine( conf );
          
          //With our new engine, lets try to open the report design
          try
          {
               design = eng.openReportDesign("C:/birt_runtime/birt-runtime-2_1_0/ReportEngine/samples/hello_world.rptdesign");
          }
          catch (Exception e)
          {
               System.err.println("An error occured during the opening of the report file!");
               e.printStackTrace();
               System.exit(-1);
          }
          
          //With the file open, create the Run and Render task to run the report
          task = eng.createRunAndRenderTask(design);
          
          //Set Render context to handle url and image locataions, and apply to the
          //task
          renderContext = new HTMLRenderContext();
          renderContext.setImageDirectory("image");
          contextMap = new HashMap();
          contextMap.put( EngineConstants.APPCONTEXT_HTML_RENDER_CONTEXT, renderContext );
          task.setAppContext( contextMap );

          //This will set the output file location, the format to rener to, and
          //apply to the task
          options = new HTMLRenderOption();
          options.setOutputFileName("c:/temp/output.html");
          options.setOutputFormat("html");
          task.setRenderOption(options);
          
          //Cross our fingers and hope everything is set
          try
          {
               task.run();
          }
          catch (Exception e)
          {
               System.err.println("An error occured while running the report!");
               e.printStackTrace();
               System.exit(-1);
          }
          
          //Yeah, we finished. Now destroy the engine and let the garbage collector
          //do its thing
          System.out.println("All went well. Closing program!");
          eng.destroy();
     }
}

The next step after this would be to parameterize the input file, output file, and output format. Then this program could be used for any report, not just this specific report. I intend to build on this example a little more, and possibly use the parameters to specify a configuration file that will be built in XML and use Apache Xerces (or, in Java 1.5, the XML components that are now included with the standard Java libraries). However, since the Xerces components are already included with the BIRT Runtime libraries, I am leaning more towards using those.