2011 Maximo Query with Open Source BIRT Sometimes an organisation needs to provide certain users with simple query tools over their key applications rather than complete access to use the application. In this case it may be appropriate to create your query tool using BIRT and format the output to resemble the original application. This is part one of a two part series. Paul Bappoo Paul@BirtReporting.com http://www.birtreporting.com 1 February 2011
CONTENTS How To Contact The Author... 4 Introduction... 5 What You Will Need... 6 The Basic Report... 7 Adding the Parameter... 9 Laying Out the Report... 13 The Header Section... 13 The Detail Section... 16 The line detail fields... 17 Conclusion... 19 More Information... 20 2
Paul Bappoo Query Maximo with Open Source BIRT (Part 1) COPYRIGHT 2011 by Paul Bappoo, all rights reserved. This guide is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance withthe terms of such license. The content of this guide is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, andshould not be construed as a commitment by the author. The author assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuraciesthat may appear in this guide. Except as permitted by such license, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, inany form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks oftheir respective holders. 3
HOW TO CONTACT THE AUTHOR Email: Paul@BirtReporting.com Web Site: http://www.birtreporting.com Paul Bappoo is the author of BIRT for Beginners (which is available in paperback from BIRTReporting.com, Amazon and Barnes and Noble amongst others) and the BIRT for Maximo Self Study Workbook, also available from BIRTReporting.com. He has been an international technical software consultant and involved with computers for over 30 years. Paul has an interest in BIRT reporting, enterprise application integration, automated software testing, computer based training and enterprise system implementation. Paul runs the BIRT User Group UK and is a member of the BIRT-Exchange Advisory Council. He would be delighted to hear from you with your tips, tricks and stories about your usage of BIRT. If you have a question, a need for training or consulting or great tip to share with the community then drop him a line. 4
INTRODUCTION Do you have Maximo users who, for the most part, only need to run queries over your Maximo data? Most large organisations do and if you have not yet identified them then now may be the time. Maximo 7.1 and above, of course, comes with BIRT 2.3.2 as the budled report writer software, however the open source community have developed BIRT beyond this version and at the time of writing 2.6.1 is the current release. BIRT can be used for more than simple reporting duties so in this tutorial we look at how to use the latest version of open source BIRT as a query tool over Maximo, running from outside the Maximo environment and how to format the resultant reports to resemble the Maximo screen that the user would see if they were logged on to Maximo itself. Even if you don t wish to report over Maximo, this tutorial provides a valuable insight into the advanced formatting capabilities of BIRT. Here is a screenshot of the report that we are going to build: The complete design files and all of the image files that were used in the creation of this report are available free of charge to readers of my book BIRT for Beginners or readers of my BIRT for Maximo Self Study Workbook. Just visit the readers area of my web site: http://www.birtreporting.com/readersentrypage.html 5
WHAT YOU WILL NEED In order to create the look and feel of this report you will need some graphic files. You can create these yourself with any image editing software or if you are a reader of my books then you can download the files from my web site. The files are as follows: MXReportHeader.jpg This is an image I created to sit at the top of all the reports and resembles the Maximo header image. Of course you can create your own image to resemble your corporate reporting style or just use mine. MXArrow.jpg This is the arrow that sits to the left of each detail line of the report. In this example we are displaying purchase order lines. In the Maximo application this image would be active and when clicked on it would reveal more details about the parchase order line. In this case it is a static image, but could easily be made into a hyperlink which would run a secondary report to show the line details. MXFindBG.jpg This image is the background to the search toolbar, that sits just beneath the main report header. It is a thin sliver of an image and the report design uses standard HTML functionality to repeat it to fill the entire width of the search bar. MXLookupBtn.gif This image is the hyperlink that actually runs the report, once the user has selected the PO Number that they want to view. You will also need a copy of the open source BIRT Report Designer and since this report uses a Java Server Page (JSP), you will need something with which to create and edit one of those. Luckily the BIRT designer is Eclipse based and so forms an excellent choice for JSP editing too. For details on how to download and intall the BIRT Designer please see my report: The Complete Getting Started Guide to BIRT which is available for free from the members area of www.birtreporting.com. 6
THE BASIC REPORT The BIRT report at the heart of this example is a very simple listing of purchase order lines, combined with a little information from the report header. When creating a report with BIRT 2.3.2 for Maximo you need to use the scripted data source method, however, when creating a report which is designed to run outside of Maximo there is a much easier way to create a data source and a data set. Again, follow the example provided in my beginners guide: The Complete Getting Started Guide to BIRT which is available for free from the members area of www.birtreporting.com. To create the example report I used for the Maximo PO Lines I created 2 datasets, one to give me a list of all the PO numbers so that the user could select one easily and one to source all the PO and POLine data. The SQL statement for the first was as follows: select distinct PONum from PO And the second was like this: select po.description as POHeadDesc, poline.*, left(poline.description,60) as LineDesc, left(po.description,50) as description, po.status, po.totalcost from POLine inner join po on po.ponum = poline.ponum where poline.ponum =? Of course you can use your own SQL and select whatever data you like for your example. TIP: It is always a good idea to write your SQL statements in a SQL query editor such as TOAD or MS SQL Enterprise Manager to ensure they work, before moving them into BIRT. 7
The question mark in the second SQL statement indicates that a parameter will be used to provide the value to the SQL at runtime. In my example this is going to be the PO Number selected by the user. Once you have created your two datasets you should be able to see them in the BIRT Designer as follows: POLines is the data set that returns the line details that will be used to populate the report and POList is the data set that returns the list of PO s that the user will select from at runtime. 8
ADDING THE PARAMETER To add the report parameter that will be selected by the user at runtime, right click on the Report Parameters node and select New Parameter. 9
Complete the parameter dialogue as shown: Notice how the display type for the parameter is set to Combo Box this is because we want the user to be able to either select from a drop down list of PO numbers or type in their own PO number. The selection list values are set as Dynamic and the data set is specified as POList (remember that s the one that provides the list of PO numbers to select from). I also like to provide a default value of a known database record so that when I test the data set in the next stage, I know if it is working! 10
Next we need to join our report parameter to the data set, so reopen the dataset and select the Parameters node. You will see an entry here called param_1 this is created automatically by BIRT because you put that question mark into the original SQL statement. Select it and click the Edit button. 11
Now in the Linked To Report Parameter field, select the report parameter that you just created. That s it, now when the report runs, the user will be asked to select or type a PO Number and this will be passed into the report SQL replacing the question mark and thereby filtering the report to select all the lines for just the one selected PO. Try this now by previewing the data set results and ensure that data is being returned. This is where the default parameter value comes in handy, because without it, no data would be returned! 12
LAYING OUT THE REPORT Next you will want to set up 2 tables on your report layout andpopulate them with fields from your data set. The first table will hold details of the PO header information so will not require any detail or footer rows, sinceit is supposed to only display a singlerecord. Create the table with 14 columns and 5 header rows. You will need to edit the table that BIRT creates for you by default to add in the additional headers and remove the footer. THE HEADER SECTION Add the following fields to the third header row: PONum Description SiteID Status TotalCost Add an appropriate label in front of each field and leave a single column empty between each label/field group, as in the screen shot below. Format the text fields as follows for the field labels: 13
And as follows for the data items: Next highlight all the cells in the second row, right click and select Merge Cells. This creates one single cell that fills theentire second row. Place a label in this cell and set the general and border properties as follows: 14
The label border colour as for most of the colours in this example, is defined using a custom colour. To create the custom colour, click the colour box, click Define Custom Colours, select the first Custom Colour box, then enter the RGB values into the appropriate fields and click Add to Custom Colours. The colour will then be available to select from the palette for use in other areas of your report. You may need to play around with the left/right justification of the fields and format the number fields appropriately. To format number fields to show two decimal places, select each number field that you wish to format and set the properties as per the screen shot below. 15
THE DETAIL SECTION Now we need to create the header for the detail lines section, which will appear in the second of the two tables. I chose to place a label in the fourth row of the first table, but it could equally be placed into the header row of the second table. Once the field is placed, set the background colour as per the screen shot below and enter the text PO Lines 16
THE LINE DETAIL FIELDS From the POLines dataset place the following fields into the second table, but this time place them into the detail section, rather than the header. POLineNum ItemNum LineDesc OrderQuantity OrderUnit UnitCost Discount Tax1 LineCost LoadedCost Notice again that we separate the individual columns with a blank column as in the screenshot below: When you add the data fields you will see that the headers are added automatically for you, but since they adopt the underlying field names, you may wish to edit them to a more appropriate value. Next we need to format the column headers and the field values. Here is the formatting for the column headers: 17
And here is the formatting for the data items: Finally the report date is added to the end of the report. BIRT does this by default and it is part of the master page. Click on the master page tab, scroll to the end and modfiy the font and background colours as we have done previously. 18
CONCLUSION That s about it for the BIRT report part of this. Preview the report in your browser and see how it looks: You will notice of course that the header image and the parameter selection are still not present and the default BIRT viewer colour scheme is occupying the top of the report window. In order to place a header image and paramter on the screen, above the report header objects we need to invoke a little Java Server Page (JSP) and that will be the subject of the next tutorial in this series. I hope you enjoy creating this Maximo styled report and I hope it is useful for you. If you have any difficulties please swing by the forum at BIRTReporting.com and post your query there. Our members are a helpful bunch and I pop on there myself from time to time so there is a good chance you will find a solution to your issue. Also, don t forget to become a member of BIRTReporting.com, it s free to join and you will automatically be alerted when the next part of this tutorial becomes available. Plus you will get free access to the members area where you can find many other tutorials like this. Finally, don t forget that if you are a reader of either of my two books, BIRT for Beginners or BIRT for Maximo Self Study Workbook then you can download the source files for this tutorial from the readers area. This will allow you to use a pre-prepared BIRT report as a template for creating these examples and any future Maximo styled reports that you need. 19
MORE INFORMATION This book, written by Paul Bappoo, the founder of the BIRT User Group UK presents an overview of the open source BIRT tools and the commercial enhancements available from Actuate, including... Eclipse BIRT Designer, Actuate BIRT Designer, iserver Express, Interactive BIRT viewer, Actuate BIRT Studio, BIRT Spreadsheet Designer With walkthrough tutorials of the main features, including screenshots, from installation through data selection to formatting reports and fully graphical Flash charting this book will have you creating your own reports from scratch in only a couple of hours. If you are too busy to spend days learning software and want tangible results fast then BIRT For Beginners is for you. When you buy the book you will automatically get access to the readers section of my web site which includes BIRT report request forms that you can distribute to your end users, extra chapters in PDF format and an ever growing library of reports, tutorials, reviews, tips & tricks. Buy the book and get free membership of BIRT Reporting and the BIRT User Group UK at: http://www.birtreporting.com Please feel free to share this address with your colleagues and inspire them to use BIRT to create great looking reports. I look forward to your feedback so please feel free to send me an email and let me know how you get on with BIRT, provide feedback on this guide or share your tips and tricks. Paul Bappoo Paul@BirtReporting.com 20