| Requesting Feedback on BIRT usability [message #179416] |
Fri, 21 July 2006 14:50 |
 Mike Fox
Messages: 7
Registered: July 2009 |
Junior Member |
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I would like to start a discussion on the issue of improving BIRT's
generaly usability. There is a lot of functionality in BIRT, but it seems
to me that BIRT would not be that usable by somebody who is not a java
programmer and familiar with Eclipse. While that fits the target user for
the initial releases, I think there is too much required knowledge for a
general report designer. The people who do this aren't usually
programmers.
Please add your thoughts to this entry. I'll volunteer to organize the
results and deliver it to the BIRT PMC.
Here are some of my observations using BIRT versions up to 2.0.1. I am
upgrading now to 2.1 and haven't used it much yet.
- Errors in a report should return an understandable message to the user,
not a java stack trace. You should be able to get the stack trace so it
could be included in a bugzilla entry if you feel it is a BIRT problem,
but it won't help the average user track down their mistake in the report.
- Its very hard to position table/grid columns accurately, ensure they are
the same width, etc. This kind of alignment is important when designing
reports to have the professional look expected by customers and senior
management. A "snap to" grid would be great.
- Provide an ability to change (or at least locate) all uses of a data
field in a report. This is needed if your dataset has to change for some
reason and you need to fixup the report to match.
- It would help to be able to default page break information based on a
standard paper size or default printer setting.
- Simplify scripting, including information on how to write better
scripts, what is possible, tools to assist scripts, etc.
- Reports with images or charts create files when they are run. There is
no provision for deleting these files, so the directory gets huge.
- I'm not sure if this is already present, but pages should have page
header/footer in addition to the report header/footer. This is needed for
putting stuff like copyright notices on each page.
Mike Fox (BIRT PMC)
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