Question

We have an IBM Maximo system that has BIRT reports built in. We are also in the process of writing an Andriod app that needs to be able to run a report (on the server) and get the PDF version back into the app (or at bare minimum, the HTML version of the report). Is there any built-in functionality for this with BIRT or Maximo??

Answer 1

My team have something similar, but we scrapped the idea of using the .rptdesign files stored on the maximo server, and solved it by setting up the BIRT runtime: (Download here).

If you have direct access to the DB you can setup the runtime with the report(s) you need and play around with the parameters.

Say that one have a report called “report1” stored on “localhost:8080” and the report contained 2 parameters called “StartDate” and “EndDate” this is how one would do it:

Instead of using the standard URL with the frameset servlet mapping: “localhost:8080/birt/frameset?__report=report1.rptdesign” and let the user run the report them self, change the servlet mapping to run.

To just run the report, without getting the parameter dialog to provide values for the two parameters, one just have to parse the parameters to the end of the URL – &StartDate=2011-01-01&EndDate=2011-01-02.

To download the file in PDF format append the viewer command option “__format=PDF” to the end of the URL.

So the end result will look like this:

localhost:8080/birt/run?_report=report1.rptdesign&StartDate=2011-01-01&EndDate=2011-01-02&_format=PDF

This will download the file in PDF format without any interactions to the actual BIRT runtime.

Hope this gives you some ideas anyways, I know it’s not an optimal solution. But at least it’s something.