Create custom reports using Birt and Rational team concert, part 2nd: Complex reports and fixed numbers

Create custom reports using Birt and Rational team concert, part 2nd: Complex reports and fixed datasets

About this article

Ibm®rational team concert™ can help software development teams store and organize large amounts of information, including work plans and tasks, build and test, source code and other fields. Visualization can be a problem for any repository of any size. How do you get a high-level view of the state of the project tracked by the Rational team concert? The dashboard and work item queries provide methods to view this information, but for a more customizable view, the Rational team concert supports generic BIRT reports to be loaded directly into the WEB client.

The first of a series of three articles covers the basics of installing Rational Team concert and BIRT, and creates some simple reports. This section deals with two topics:

Use the data in the report to perform complex alternating-reference operations

Resolve contact issues between work items to display superior-subordinate relationships in the report

Prerequisite conditions

This series of articles assumes that you are basically familiar with reports in Rational team concert, including creating reports, working with data sources and data collections, adding tables to reports, and so on. These issues are already covered in part 1th. If you are unfamiliar with the reports in the Rational Team concert and BIRT, you can learn that article first.

After completing this article, you will need a free account on jazz.net and a full or trial version of the Rational Team Concert server and the Rational Team concert client. If you do not have servers and clients, part 1th describes how to get a trial version of the Rational Team concert Server and a free version of the Rational Team concert client.

Create a complex report for a fixed table

The difference between the Birt report and the Rational Team concert work item query is that Birt allows you to handle multiple data sources, but the Rational team concert Web client only needs to process one work item query at a time. Therefore, you can display more than one datasheet at a time in the report, and you can alternately reference the dataset to show more complex information.

Let's say you're a manager with multiple employees. If you want to easily see the work items for a team, you can create a query that displays the work items for the team area, sorted by the owner of the work item. A better way is to display team member information, and each member has a list of work items. This can be accomplished in a docked table in a BIRT report.

A fixed table is included in the other table. In this example, each row of the outer table shows information about different users. The fixed table for the work item is inside the outer table so that the fixed table repeats each row in the outer table. The fixed tables for these work items are filtered to show only the work items for the current row of the outer table. The structure of the resulting data on the report is shown in Listing 1.

Listing 1. Sample data from a table

CONTRIBUTOR_NAME　　TEAM_AREA_NAME
John　Doe　　　　　　Team　A
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 WI_ID　　SUMMARY
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 101　　　A　task　for　John
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 102　　　Something　for　John　to　do
Jane　Smith　　　　　Team　B
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 WI_ID　　SUMMARY
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 103　　　Jane's　task
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 104　　　Jane　needs　to　do　this