It would be useful to have the option to have the table feature in the BIRT reporter to run horizontally as well as the standard vertical.
so what I mean is that instead of rows from a Knime table populating downwards in a BIRT table, instead you can have the rows from a Knime table populating across wards in a BIRT table.
this can be useful to dynamically allow variable columns across the report. I am using a workaround with the column grid node and visibility options on columns etc, but this is a big faff and slows down BIRT so much it can take 4hrs to get into the BIRT report. Probably because all the columns are duplicated so much from the column to grid node. So it becomes really impractical.
I guess you can do that now already with BIRT Cross Tables. It's a bit of a pain as you will have to give up your nice KNIME table structure and flat it out to a three column table (Group or RowID, Column Name, Value) --- the Unpivot nodes helps to do that.
Next step is then to feed that into BIRT. In BIRT you define what they call a Data Cube, whereby the Group/RowID + the Column Name are Group columns and the Value is ... the Value. You can define new Data Cubes in the "Data Explorer" (View -> Other ..).
Next step is then to define a "Cross Table" report element and associate it with the data cube. You drag the columns where they belong, do some formatting and then you end up with a dynamic-column table. I noticed that BIRT chokes if you have more than 50 columns (the "Preview" fails -- PDF output is OK, it seems). But then again, do you have more than 50 columns?
Example attached. I didn't spend a minute on formatting. It's only a plain table with a variable number of columns.