After nearly nine months of report development (primarily motivated by the need to replace maintenance of a 3rd party, bespoke package) it has been BIRT all the way as far as performance and flexibility goes. Once we got to grips with the development environment and TSQL, the flexibility of design that we garnered proved irresistable. I had supposed that SharperLight would be the initator - to be used by end-users to sketch a report thast would eventually be developed via BIRT.

So far, however, once the reports required for replacement were developed and tested, the only new reports have been ones that I have needed to answer questions from users concerning timing and content of work plans and routes.

From someone like me who has learned the necessary skills while attempting to write reports with BIRT, a couple of  techniques have emerged that make my later reports work very differently from earlier efforts. As a preamble I should say that I learned lots by looking at the reports included with Maximo. Perforce they are engineered using the scripted data set approach. This is necessary for BIRT reports that are to be deployed within Maximo. At BMS we use an off-line data set that is available on a local SQL Server (this allows users to run reports outside of Maximo - but that is another story). The scripted reports that are provided with Maximo are not all functional - unless they have been fine tuned for the configuration you are using. Like many, our implementation budget precluded this as a "day one" option. Howerver these reports, even in there current "raw" state, provide an excellent insight into a variety of approaches to how to structure both the query and layout components of your BIRT reports. As mentioned earlier, since studying these reports I have found myself moving towards using sub-reports, rather than a single report with grouping. These two techniques will usually get you to the same place but have a variety of pros and cons - but the former allows more flexibility, simplifies queries by segmenting them and, in some cases (such as hierarchies) provides efficient solutions as it allows a single report to be called recursively.

So - apart from using sub-reports - what else has emerged from many months of report writing? As more reports have been developed the opportunity to use the hyperlinking to drill-down has become more relevant. This technique, which can be seen throughout Maximo's standard reports, provides a listing report - say assests or locations - with a hyperlink on the asset or location identifier to a detailed view. I now find that any report that provides a sub-report usually provides and opportunitya hyperlink to one or more detail reports.