Report Items (Elements)
BIRT provides a variety of report items or Elements for use when creating your report. Report items appear in the Palette view. Report items include:
- Label - Displays a simple piece of text such as "Customer Name".
- Text - Text that can include HTML formatting and computed values. Used to create headings, form letters, "mail-merge" effects, etc.
- Dynamic Text - Displays a database column that can contain HTML formatted (CLOB) data. Allows for advanced CLOB data manipulation through expressions.
- Data - Displays a database column or a computed value. Provides formatting.
- Image - Any kind of image supported by a web browser. Images can be embedded in the report, referenced through a URI, read from the resource folder or retrieved from a BLOB field in a data set.
- Grid - Provides a tabular arrangement of report items, much like an HTML table. This element doesnt iterate over data sets like a List or a Table.
- List - Presents data from a data set in any kind of format. Used when the layout for each row is more sophisticated than a simple table row. This Element will iterate over a bound Data Set.
- Table - Presents data from a data set in the form of a table. Can contain grouping levels. Like an HTML table that has a table row for each data set row. This Element, like a list will iterate over a bound Data Set.
- Chart - Displays a business chart such as a pie chart, line chart, etc.
This tutorial will use all the elements except for List, Chart and Dynamic Text.
