There is a saying, "one picture is worth a thousand words". The same applies to graphic reports and we in Service Economics Solution team had realized we had offered none of them for Valuemation 4.1. So let's create at least "Service Specification" and "Service Catalog" reports. As simple as saying this? Not at all!

Each customizer finds the way how to make things easier. That's why the first idea that came to my mind was: We can take advantage of new "Print to PDF" functionality in Valuemation 4.2. If you run "Print to PDF with..." action, you can see a nice Report Teplate dialog with four tabs, where you can fiddle with all those settings... and you come to believe everything is possible there. The only thing you have to create is view marked as "Print View". And you will get what you see in the view - the real WYSIWYG! I took the requirements from Peter and read: create header with title (should be easy), list all selected Services (easy) with parameters groupped by four levels (hmm, it could be problem) and put footer at the end of page (easy). So I have to create the catalog with groupped parameters. Done. Then to create the view and put the catalog as to-many view. Done.

It is time for the first test. I added the action "Print to PDF" to Service catalog, selected some Services and... there was everything but what I expected on the screen! So I drilled down to Report Teplate dialog and started clicking on various options there. First: set Selected Objects = "Print using the print view", otherwise you get simple listing of selected objects. Second: put your text to header on "Header & Footer" tab. I want to put "Service Specification" as page header, but not as simple text but label for translation. So I open the documentation and find how to write labeled text. Do you think it is possible? No! You have to create English report template with English texts and German report template with German texts and so on. Never mind, I go on. There is only a simple list of parameters shown in to-many view, how to show grouping? There exists the only possibility - switching catalog to tree view. But PDF report is not able to show catalog in tree view! And as I went further and further I found it is not possible:

• to put ID for translated strings (from bundle /messages/Messages)
• to change descriptive field for the current object
• to show more than one level of grouping in catalog or TMV
• to show catalog in tree view (must be shown expanded!)
• to show multiline catalog or TMV
• to use more than one Print View

So if you need any of the features above, you have to use another platform.

BIRT reports stands for our official reporting platform after Crystal Reports we used before. It is open source project, and can be widely used in commercial products. BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you add to your app server. BIRT also offers a charting engine that lets you add charts to your own application. So it was good choice to select BIRT as it is same powerful, runs on many platforms and it is for free.

Ladislav Laszlo, Solution Architect - USU AG