BIRT integration with CiviCRM

I've been spending the past few days with Eclipse and BIRT. Their examples and screencasts are quite valuable to understanding a fairly complex application. I suspect this model of documentation is quite applicable to CiviCRM also. I'm making pretty good progress with CiviReport and currently have a BIRT library with various reports that can be distributed. I'm focusing on CiviContribute for the initial set of reports, but it is quite easy to adapt the reports to CiviMember and CiviEvent. BIRT allows you to have drill down reports (i.e. from a high level report, you can get more detailed reports on various aspects by drilling down a level or two). Thus a top level contribution report could give you breakdown by year, state and your top 5 donors. You can then drill down into details for each year, or state or a more detailed contribution report on a donor. There are a few generic reports that we will create and distribute. However reporting is quite user specific and would be great to actually design and develop detailed reports for a few specific users. If you have a user who you think could benefit from CiviReport, please contact me offline and we can do a test deploy etc. Here are some basic requirements:

• Ability to install Eclipse and BIRT on local desktop. Note that Eclipse and BIRT are pretty resource intensive so having a fairly powerful machine is mandatory along with a fair amount of RAM (1G at least). Your local desktop should be able to access your CiviCRM database.
• Ability to install Java/Tomcat on server (or your favorite J2EE server)
• Some experience with Java/Tomcat/Unix SysAdmin
• An existing data set along with specific report requirements
• You will need to spend a fair amount of time working with us to make this a reality

Please contact me off list if this might be of interest to you

Comments

Hi Donald - pete from the Greens here - was just looking at where things were with reports and got here. Is it just me or is it frustrating to others that many docs such as this blog don't seem to show the date (or am i just going blind?). As it is i sometimes find it hard to work out which are recent conversations and which are dated. pete

hey pete:

i just checked and all the blogs do have an author and time stamp below the title.

All entries on CiviReport are at: http://civicrm.org/CiviReport/

Here's a list for all whats coming in v1.8: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+v1.8

let me know if you have any more questions. yes, the information is a bit scattered between the forum / wiki / issue tracker / mailing list, but hopefully things will improve over a period of time

lobo

With the need to produce civicrm reports for a client, I spent a few hours trying to figure out BIRT, Eclipse and how to get it all working together. It all took a while, but I managed to get the combination to work.

The report functionality is quite powerful, but it isn't the easiest thing to install for the novice or intermediate expert. To help others get past some of the complex steps - i'll post in the coming days a detailed blog with more details.

I hope that with some detailed instructions others will be able to to share in the reporting joy :)