Dear all,
Birt is coming from an open source project. of couse, Infor had spend many time on the JDBC. But it seems Infor don't want the customers to learn it first. Because without the licence, you even cannot have test on that software.

But what's the secury? I think that's just a convert from Baan SQL to "Normal" SQL.

Maybe if somebody think over the jar file, we can get a new software. afterthat, I don't think Brit is necessary.

Jeffers

Don't mix up three things:

BIRT has nothing to do with Infor: It is an open source project, licenced in a way that makes it also usable in commercial projects, and this is what Infor does. (It just would be good style if some day they give something back to the open source community for what they took). You can download BIRT and install it into eclipse using the Eclipse update manager. Using JDBC you can access any JDBC compliant database passing SQL queries to it, you can use it on flat files, you can use it on XML streams.

Next, there is an Infor JDBC driver for Baan. I haven't seen that working yet, but it looks like it would enable you to use Baan SQL on a Baan system (so, it routes your SQL via the Baan database driver to the database). Which is a nice feature, since you get database independancy.

BIRT is basically "pull reporting": You start a report, it gets data from a database or other source. No business logic involved.

Third, there is the BIRT integration (which will only work for Webtop!). I haven't seen this working, too, so I'm guessing from the bit of documentation that is available. As far as I understand, there are three main features: In web based reports (which you can start from those silly "homepages"), you can replace the standard parameter dialog with a Baan session, which gives you the full 4GL functionality for zooming, data checking etc. So the information flow would be BIRT -> bshell -> BIRT. Next, there seems to be something called "push reporting", which works the other way around. You start a session in Baan, this selects values and sends them to a BIRT report, which is a special kind of device (bshell->BIRT). The report does no longer access the database, but values prepared by the session. I think, this will be the future direction. For two reasons: First, some new Sessions operate already this way (no data selection in the report script any longer, everything is done by the session. Very hard to customize). Next, the third part of the BIRT Integration will have the same problems the deceased Crystal integration had: You take a standard Baan Report and convert it into a BIRT report. Infor claims that the business logic in the report script will get executed (I guess instead of streaming to the internal spooling system they will stream the report output as XML to BIRT, so bshell->bshell->BIRT), but they also say any changes in the BIRT layout will get lost as soon as something is changed in the standard report. That, of course, is a maintainance nightmare.

All Three Componentes plus additional software (Eclipse, some other Eclipse plugins and so on) are bundled as the "Infor Reporting Studio".

But, as I said, you don't need any Infor software to experiment with BIRT or use BIRT reporting on your Baan data.

ulrich.fuchs,
But I would like to know where the Infor JDBC execute the function to conver the Baan sql to standard sql.
do you have any idea?

Don't mix up three things:

BIRT has nothing to do with Infor: It is an open source project, licenced in a way that makes it also usable in commercial projects, and this is what Infor does. (It just would be good style if some day they give something back to the open source community for what they took). You can download BIRT and install it into eclipse using the Eclipse update manager. Using JDBC you can access any JDBC compliant database passing SQL queries to it, you can use it on flat files, you can use it on XML streams.

Next, there is an Infor JDBC driver for Baan. I haven't seen that working yet, but it looks like it would enable you to use Baan SQL on a Baan system (so, it routes your SQL via the Baan database driver to the database). Which is a nice feature, since you get database independancy.

BIRT is basically "pull reporting": You start a report, it gets data from a database or other source. No business logic involved.

Third, there is the BIRT integration (which will only work for Webtop!). I haven't seen this working, too, so I'm guessing from the bit of documentation that is available. As far as I understand, there are three main features: In web based reports (which you can start from those silly "homepages"), you can replace the standard parameter dialog with a Baan session, which gives you the full 4GL functionality for zooming, data checking etc. So the information flow would be BIRT -> bshell -> BIRT. Next, there seems to be something called "push reporting", which works the other way around. You start a session in Baan, this selects values and sends them to a BIRT report, which is a special kind of device (bshell->BIRT). The report does no longer access the database, but values prepared by the session. I think, this will be the future direction. For two reasons: First, some new Sessions operate already this way (no data selection in the report script any longer, everything is done by the session. Very hard to customize). Next, the third part of the BIRT Integration will have the same problems the deceased Crystal integration had: You take a standard Baan Report and convert it into a BIRT report. Infor claims that the business logic in the report script will get executed (I guess instead of streaming to the internal spooling system they will stream the report output as XML to BIRT, so bshell->bshell->BIRT), but they also say any changes in the BIRT layout will get lost as soon as something is changed in the standard report. That, of course, is a maintainance nightmare.

All Three Componentes plus additional software (Eclipse, some other Eclipse plugins and so on) are bundled as the "Infor Reporting Studio".

But, as I said, you don't need any Infor software to experiment with BIRT or use BIRT reporting on your Baan data.