How to Deploy BIRT into Spring Boot Starter to Achieve More Functional Web Applications?

In this guide, you learn how to deploy BIRT Spring Boot Starter in your web application. First, why does it matter? Data, information and reporting play a big part in your organization’s decisions. With relevant data and information, you are able to create reports that give you insights into important trends, patterns, and growth prospects, help you have a more critical view and analyzation of the information at your hand and supports in devising the action plan for the future operations so that you are able to lead business growth.

BIRT, the business intelligence and reporting tool, creates clear reports. Those reports give decision-makers the insights they want from relevant data. However, you only get real value when you deploy the whole BIRT solution and its reports into your web application. Then it can generate data from the application and give you ideas that drive growth.

The Webviewer app is an easy way to do this deployment, but it is not practical. You can deploy the BIRT reports to your applications with it. However, it lacks content management and security, which is a big gap.

How to Deploy BIRT with Spring Boot Starter

So, what approach should you take to deploy BIRT into your web application? You want to use all the functions of the tool and make your web application more robust.

The answer is Spring Boot Starter! Spring Boot is a framework for building service-based applications. When you deploy BIRT into your application with this framework, you can use the features of BIRT right inside your application.

Basically, this deployment needs two things:

1. Adding the Spring Boot Dependency Section

2. Configuring the Workspace

This article is a detailed tutorial on both processes. As a result, you can add BIRT functions to your web application without fuss. If you need help, see our web development services.

Deploy BIRT Spring Boot Starter: Add the Dependency

Step 1: Open your Spring Tool Suite. (For the purpose of this article, all the explanations are made with reference to Spring Tool Suite 4 and BIRT version 4.80.)

Step 2: Create a New Project

Click on “File”, and select “New” from the drop-down menu. From the sub-menu, select “Spring Starter Project”.

Step 3: Fill in the Details

A form will appear on your screen asking for details about the project. Enter details such as Name, Group and Artifact. Leave the other fields at their defaults, or change them to suit your needs.

When you are done, click “Next”.

Step 4: Add Additional Content

Another dialog box appears where you can add more details about your project. However, if you want to keep the project simple, skip this step and click the “Finish” button.

Now your new project exists, and you can add the dependency.

In your project, you see four files: application, application.properties, application test and pom.xml. You need the pom.xml file to add the dependency. When you open it, you see one dependency already, the root starter. Below are the steps to create the other dependencies you need.

Step 5: Creating Dependency

You have two alternative methods to do this.

Editing the XML file which requires running a code

Add the dependency manually, just like you added the project.

Creating Dependency through XML File

All you have to do to create a dependency by editing the XML file is run the below command.

<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<artifactId>com.innoventsolutions.birt-spring-boot</artifactId>
<groupId>birt-spring-boot-starter</groupId>
<version>0.0.7</version>
</dependency>

Creating Dependencies with the Spring Boot Starter User Interface

Step 1: From the Menu, go to “Dependencies” and select “Add New”.

Step 2: A dialog box will show on your screen. Fill it as per your requirements, and then click “Okay”.

This creates the dependency. Save the pom.xml file as soon as you add it.
Then Maven downloads all the dependencies you created, and you see them in your project. Now you can use the BIRT components in your application. Use the Boot Dashboard to run the project in regular or debug mode.

However, if you run the project now, the Spring Boot Dashboard shows a WARN error. This happens because you have not configured your workspace yet.

Configure the Workspace to Deploy BIRT Spring Boot

A workspace is basically the root folder that you use to create the paths for the other sub-folders and directories. The Eclipse BIRT reporting system relies on this workspace concept. For this reason, you must create one in your Spring Boot Starter.

The best way to create this workspace is to make a new project in your STS workspace with Git. Here are the steps.

Step 1: Click on file and then import and select Git from the search window.

Step 2: A dialog box will open to Import the Projects from Git. From here, select “Clone URI”.

Step 3: Enter the relevant URI to locate the GitHub repository you have to clone for creating the workspace.

Step 4: Another dialog box will open. Select “master” branch in this box and click “Next”.

Step 5: Another dialog box shall open. From this Dialog Box, select the location of the Directory. Also, adjust this directory location to the location where you have set up your spring boot starter project.

Step 6: You shall be prompted to select a wizard for importing the project. Select “Import as a General project”, and click “Next”

Step 7: In the next dialog box, enter the Name of your project and click “Finish”.

Then your full directory structure shows up, with the BIRT Test Report Designs inside it.

Finally, restart the project. The warning message no longer appears. This shows you deployed BIRT successfully, so you can use its components directly in your web application.