Is there a way to automate the report design?

I have a report with a longer table as input.
As the resulting chart was a bit to long and therefore hard to read, I made the decision to split the chart into two.
That’s by far not an issue.
But as I’s still in development I’m facing the challenge to keep two charts in BIRT synchronised which is very nasty, time consuming and prone to errors. And that will no be easier task later.

Is there a way how this can be supported by a better way?
E.g. creating the second diagram automatically when starting the report (by copying, moving to the rght place and manipulating a bit the data source)?

Hi @knimediger,

I think I did not fully understand what you mean with “keep charts in BIRT synchronised”.

Generally speaking (attention: I’m highly biased towards KNIME), if it is not a simple page break after a specific amount of lines, I’d rather do all the transformations in KNIME and send multiple tables and images to BIRT. These can then be arranged as seperate report items in your report layout.

Is this any helpful?

Best,
Marten

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Hello @Marten_Pfannenschmidt,

I tried using generating charts (not tables/lists) in Knime and showing them in a BIRT report. But the result was not very nice as the generated graphics have too huge borders.
Then I found the charts in BIRT which look much better. So I’m working with the diagram engine in BIRT.

Here my example: I have sales from shops like

shop | sales
and I would like to have a bar chart of all shops with their sales total. Of cuase ordered by sales total).
As there are many shops the resulting bar chart is too huge to fit on one page.
So I deceided to split the chart into two.
Now I have one chart for shops with higher sales and a second for the lower volume shops.

The challenge comes now with the changes in the chart design.
If I change something (e.g the colours) this should also be changed in the second chart. Otherwise the report looks a bit unstructured.
It might also happen that additional data is displayed in the chart (let’s show the costs of each shop in the same diagram). Again I should keep both charts the same (starting from the data definition, …).

That’s the background of my question. Is there a better way to manage these activities on the chart design in BIRT?

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