In this chapter, we have covered the basics, but the BIRT ecosystem has much more to offer. The most important might be the way you can create interactive reports. Although there are highly interactive components available, such as the BIRT Interactive Viewer (http://www.birt-exchange.com/be/products/birt-user-experience/interactive-viewer/features/), which is not an open source option, you still have the option to change the behavior on certain conditions with JavaScript.
The Advanced BIRT Report Customization: Report Scripting video (from 2008) might be a good start towards scripting. You can view it after registration at the following link:
http://www.birt-exchange.com/be/info/birtscripting-websem/
There is a nice JavaScript library named D3.js (http://d3js.org), which allows you to have reports almost as interactive as the BIRT Interactive Viewer would offer for certain output formats. An example on how you can combine both BIRT and D3.js together can be found at http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/devshare/designing-birt-reports/1535-d3-tree-node-layout-example/.
You can check the other KNIME workflows featuring KNIME reporting; it can help you get familiarized with how to use both parts of KNIME efficiently, and which tasks should be done in separate processing steps.
If you prefer, you can check the following YouTube videos from the KNIME documentation page (http://tech.knime.org/screencasts-0):
- KNIME Report Creation: http://youtu.be/jKWQhFrBuzQ
- KNIME - Use of Variables with Reporting: http://youtu.be/RHvVuHsvf0U
- KNIME - Including Chemical Structures in Reporting: http://youtu.be/5T2SIrKAc5s
The BIRT Exchange site (http://www.birt-exchange.org/org/home/) is also a great source of help. It contains tutorials, examples, and components. Obviously, the Eclipse BIRT home page (http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/) can also be a good place to start.
The other user communities (for example, http://www.birtreporting.com) and BIRT-related materials are usually easily adaptable for KNIME reporting. If you do not find a solution for your KNIME reporting problem, it is always a good strategy to try it with the BIRT search expression instead of KNIME reporting.
The companies offering commercial extensions for BIRT usually also have some BIRT-related forums or articles.
If you want to integrate the reporting to another product, the Jason Weathersby; Tom Bondur; and Iana Chatalbasheva's book Integrating and Extending BIRT may be interesting for you.
Finally, you can read the following two books that might be useful for digging deep into the BIRT design:
- BIRT A Field Guide by Diana Peh, Nola Hague, and Jane Tatchell
- Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT by John Ward