BIRT to the Rescue
One of the most exciting verticals of open source software right now is the business intelligence market. Historically, this marketplace has been dominated by a few large vendors including MicroStrategy, Business Objects and Cognos.
But with the emergence of Pentaho and Eclipse’s Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), there are now some viable open source options.
Just like most proprietary software solutions, one of the biggest impediments to implementing a closed source reporting or business intelligence environment is the upfront costs associated with ownership.
By leveraging an open source product, we have been able to test and implement a several solutions without the initial hurdle of high costs.
The first requirement was to deliver a set of Excel reports based upon a CiviCRM database of contact and contribution data.
The client wanted to provide some parameters to the reports, such as date ranges and the type of contributions to display.
And we wanted to make sure we had a solution that would allow us to make quick and error-free changes as the report requirements evolved.
The perfect solution to this problem was to leverage BIRT’s Viewer application.
This is a Java web application that provides all of the required functionality out of the box, including prompting the users for report parameters, running the report against the database, displaying the data to the user and easily exporting the results to Excel.
All we had to do was write the SQL and put together a quick report layout, which is all done with a graphical tool built on top of the popular Eclipse IDE.
This solution has proved to be extremely flexible, allowing us to easily make changes to existing reports or implement new reports in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.
The second requirement we encountered was to provide a printable version of a series of web pages that contained user-entered data.
The web pages are contained in a Java-based web application that is using Hibernate to persist all of the data to the database.
In this situation, we were able to use BIRT’s scripted data source functionality to integrate with our existing data access layer and avoid having to write SQL to access the 20-30 tables that contain all of the relevant data.
Once we had the data integrated into our BIRT report, it was simply a matter of using a basic UI editor to lay out the data in a suitable fashion.
And since BIRT can render PDF files out of the box based upon the report design, we had our solution to delivering a printable version of this dynamic data over the web.
While these two examples are only a small sampling of what can be achieved, they definitely illustrate the power of having these tools available in the open source community.
If this functionality had only been available in a proprietary solution, we probably would have been stuck implementing a custom solution in both of these situations.
Instead, we have been able to leverage the same tool and gain quite a bit of knowledge about the product.
Hopefully we can leverage these experiences and find another great use for BIRT in the future.
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