A long time has passed since my previous BIRT examples Deploying BIRT Report Engine API with Jakarta Struts and Deploying BIRT Report Engine API with Stripes.
Although they have received a lot of attention and downloads, the examples were really basic and are now outdated.

Since I had to use BIRT in my last projects I decided to update my BIRT/Stripes example.
This example doesn’t depend on the Tribix project anymore since BIRT supports HTML/Paginated HTML, PDF, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PostScript outputs (images/charts are not embedded in Excel output).

I’ve tried to follow some good practices that I think are important to use in a production application:

• There is a significant cost associated with creating an engine instance, due primarily to the cost of loading extensions. Therefore, each application should create just one ReportEngine instance and use it to run multiple reports. In this example the engine is started in the context listener and the same instance is always used.
• All texts in the report should be loaded from the resources so the application can be fully localizable and fully internationalized.
• You should use a JDBC data set to preview your report with BIRT designer but you must swap the data set in runtime to use data from your business logic.
• You should use predefined styles instead of custom styles as much as you can.
• Not a good practice but often a requirement, hide the master page when generating a HTML report, and change the visibility of elements so they are visible only to specified outputs.

For this example BIRT Runtime Engine 2.2.2 2.3.1, and Stripes Framework 1.5 were used.
» Read more: BIRT/Stripes framework example