OFBIZ Reports with BIRT
Generating Open For Business Reports with the BIRT RCP Designer
by Leon Torres and Si Chen
The Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) is a suite of tools for generating professional-looking
reports from a database. BIRT can be integrated into a web application server framework to render
reports in HTML or PDF on the fly. Alternatively, BIRT can run standalone using the Rich Client
Platform (RCP) Designer application, which is installed on a client machine and connects to an OFBiz
database remotely.
Overview
This tutorial describes in detail how to set up the BIRT RCP Designer application on a Windows
machine as a client to an OFBiz database running on another machine. It also presents a brief tutorial
on how to generate reports using sample sales orders created in the OFBiz Order Manager application.
The database used in this tutorial is PostgreSQL 8.0. However, it is easy to replicate the instructions for
any other database.
Prerequisites
OFBiz running on a database of your choice. In this tutorial, we will cover PostgreSQL 8.0.
Standalone BIRT RCP Designer (download the latest onto the Windows client machine).
• http://download.eclipse.org/birt/downloads/
Configuration
First, you will need to configure the OFBiz database to allow connections from the Windows client
machine.
In order to do this in PostgreSQL, edit the pg_hba.conf file and enter a line to allow access from the
client machine's IP address, or, if desired, from the IP block which the client machine resides in. In this
example we will assume that the client machine and the server running OFBiz and PostgreSQL 8.0 are
in the same internal network block 192.168.1.0/24.
# Enter this line into pg_hba.conf
host all all 192.168.1.0/24 md5
Database connectivity can be tested from within the BIRT RCP Designer.
© 2006 Open Source Strategies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
