Maximo Query With Open Source BIRT Part 1

8/2/2019 Maximo Query With Open Source BIRT Part 1

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Maximo Query withOpen Source BIRTSometimes 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.

2011

Paul Bappoo

[email protected]

http://www.BirtReporting.com

February 2011
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/mailto:[email protected]


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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


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Paul BappooQuery 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 transmitt ed, 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.


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HOW TO CONTACT THE AUTHOR

Email:[email protected]

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.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/BIRTTraining.htmlhttp://www.birtreporting.com/mailto:[email protected]


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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 thetime. Maximo 7.1 and above, of course, comes with BIRT 2.3.2 as the budled report writersoftware, however the open source community have developed BIRT beyond this version and atthe 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 usethe latest version of open source BIRT as a query tool over Maximo, running from outside theMaximo environment and how to format the resultant reports to resemble the Maximo screenthat the user would see if they were logged on to Maximo itself. Even if you dont wish to reportover Maximo, this tutorial provides a valuable insight into the advanced formatting capabilities ofBIRT.

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 reportare 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
http://www.birtreporting.com/ReadersEntryPage.htmlhttp://www.birtreporting.com/ReadersEntryPage.htmlhttp://www.birtreporting.com/ReadersEntryPage.html


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WHAT YOU WILL NEED

In order to create the look and feel of this report you will need some graphic files. You cancreate these yourself with any image editing software or if you are a reader of my books then youcan 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 headerimage. 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 aredisplaying purchase order lines. In the Maximo application this image would be active and whenclicked on it would reveal more details about the parchase order line. In this case it is a staticimage, but could easily be made into a hyperlink which would run a secondary report to show theline 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 itto 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 PONumber that they want to view.

You will also need a copy of the open source BIRT Report Designer and since this report uses aJava 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 CompleteGetting Started Guide to BIRT which is available for free from the members area ofwww.BIRTReporting.com.
http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/


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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 sourcemethod, however, when creating a report which is designed to run outside of Maximo there is amuch easier way to create a data source and a data set. Again, follow the example provided inmy beginners guide: The Complete Getting Started Guide to BIRT which is available for free fromthe members area ofwww.BIRTReporting.com.

To create the example report I used for the Maximo PO Lines I created 2 datasets, one to giveme a list of all the PO numbers so that the user could select one easily and one to source all thePO and POLine data.

The SQL statement for the first was as follows:

And the second was like this:

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 TOADor MS SQL Enterprise Manager to ensure they work, before moving them into BIRT.

select distinct PONum

fromPO

select

po.description as POHeadDesc,

poline.*,

left(poline.description,60) as LineDesc,

left(po.description,50) as description,

po.status,

po.totalcost

fromPOLine

inner join po on po.ponum = poline.ponum

where poline.ponum = ?
http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/http://www.birtreporting.com/


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The question mark in the second SQL statement indicates that a parameter will be used toprovide the value to the SQL at runtime. In my example this is going to be the PO Numberselected by the user.

Once you have created your two datasets you should be able to see them in the BIRT Designeras follows:

POLines is the data set that returns the line details that will be used to populate the report andPOList is the data set that returns the list of POs that the user will select from at runtime.


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ADDING THE PARAMETER

To add the report parameter that will be selected by the user at runtime, right click on the ReportParameters node and select New Parameter.


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Complete the parameter dialogue as shown:

Notice how the display type for the parameter is set to Combo Box this is because we want theuser to be able to either select from a drop down list of PO numbers or type in their own POnumber.

The selection list values are set as Dynamic and the data set is specified as POList (rememberthats 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 inthe next stage, I know if it is working!


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Next we need to join our report parameter to the data set, so reopen the dataset and select theParameters node.

You will see an entry here called param_1 this is created automatically by BIRT because youput that question mark into the original SQL statement. Select it and click the Edit button.


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Now in the Linked To Report Parameter field, select the report parameter that you just created.Thats it, now when the report runs, the user will be asked to select ortype a PO Number and thiswill be passed into the report SQL replacing the question mark and thereby filtering the report toselect 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 iswhere the default parameter value comes in handy, because without it, no data would bereturned!


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LAYING OUT THE REPORT

Next you will want to set up 2 tables on your report layout andpopulate them with fields from yourdata set.

The first table will hold details of the PO header information so will not require any detail or footerrows, sinceit is supposed to only display a singlerecord. Create the table with 14 columns and 5header rows. You will need to edit the table that BIRT creates for you by default to add in theadditional headers and remove the footer.

THE HEADER SECTION

Add the following fields to the third header row:

PONumDescriptionSiteIDStatusTotalCost

Add an appropriate label in front of each field and leave a single column empty between eachlabel/field group, as in the screen shot below.

Format the text fields as follows for the field labels:


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And as follows for the data items:

Next highlight all the cells in the second row, right click and select Merge Cells. This creates onesingle cell that fills theentire second row. Place a label in this cell and set the general and borderproperties as follows:


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The label border colour as for most of the colours in this example, is defined using a customcolour. To create the custom colour, click the colour box, click Define Custom Colours, select thefirst Custom Colour box, then enter the RGB values into the appropriate fields and click Add toCustom Colours. The colour will then be available to select from the palette for use in other areasof your report.

You may need to play around with the left/right justification of the fields and format the numberfields appropriately. To format number fields to show two decimal places, select each numberfield that you wish to format and set the properties as per the screen shot below.


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THE DETAIL SECTION

Now we need to create the header for the detail lines section, which will appear in the second ofthe two tables. I chose to place a label in the fourth row of the first table, but it could equally beplaced 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


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THE LINE DETAIL FIELDS

From the POLines dataset place the following fields into the second table, but this time placethem into the detail section, rather than the header.

POLineNumItemNumLineDescOrderQuantityOrderUnitUnitCostDiscountTax1LineCostLoadedCost

Notice again that we separate the individual columns with a blank column as in the screenshotbelow:

When you add the data fields you will see that the headers are added automatically for you, butsince they adopt the underlying field names, you may wish to edit them to a more appropriatevalue.

Next we need to format the column headers and the field values. Here is the formatting for thecolumn headers:


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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 ofthe master page. Click on the master page tab, scroll to the end and modfiy the font andbackground colours as we have done previously.


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CONCLUSION

Thats about it forthe BIRT report part of this. Preview the report in your browser and see how itlooks:

You will notice of course that the header image and the parameter selection are still not presentand 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 objectswe need to invoke a little Java Server Page (JSP) and that will be the subject of the next tutorialin this series.

I hope you enjoy creating this Maximo styled report and I hope it is useful for you. If you have anydifficulties please swing by the forum at BIRTReporting.com and post your query there. Ourmembers are a helpful bunch and I pop on there myself from time to time so there is a goodchance you will find a solution to your issue.

Also, dont forget to become a member of BIRTReporting.com, its free to join and you willautomatically be alerted when the next part of this tutorial becomes available. Plus you will getfree access to the members area where you can find many other tutorials like this.

Finally, dont forget that if you are a reader of either of my two books, BIRT for Beginners orBIRT for Maximo Self Study Workbook then you can download the source files for this tutorialfrom the readers area. This will allow you to use a pre-prepared BIRT report as a template forcreating these examples and any future Maximo styled reports that you need.


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MORE INFORMATION

This book, written by Paul Bappoo, the founder of theBIRT User Group UK presents an overview of theopen source BIRT tools and the commercialenhancements 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 dataselection to formatting reports and fully graphicalFlash charting this book will have you creating yourown reports from scratch in only a couple of hours.

If you are too busy to spend days learning softwareand want tangible results fast then BIRT ForBeginners is for you.

When you buy the book you will automatically getaccess to the readers section of my web site whichincludes BIRT report request forms that you candistribute to your end users, extra chapters in PDFformat 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

[email protected]
http://www.birtreporting.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.birtreporting.com/BIRTTraining.htmlmailto:[email protected]://www.birtreporting.com/

Documents

Maximo Query With Open Source BIRT Part 1