BIRT Reports are often an important part of Maximo installations. They provide a relatively quick way to extract information from Maximo databases. In the hands of a skilled report writer it is possible to extract a lot of valuable data and even compare related data in two systems e.g. Maximo and a financial system.
Two key parts of a report’s configuration are stored in the following tables:
- REPORT - contains important report details e.g. reportname and row limits.
- REPORTDESIGN - contains the report definition in XML format.
In my last article I mentioned exporting the reports and this article will cover some of the problems you could experience when exporting reports and how to overcome them.
Out Of the Box Exportreports Command
The exportreports command is useful because it allows support staff to download all the reports in a system for investigation.
The batch file for the command is stored on the build server in the following location:
\ibm\SMP\maximo\reports\birt\tools
The exportreports command uses a file (reporttools.properties) that stores the login credentials and JVM connection details.
The default configuration will need to be modified for your environment before it can be used.
Tip -> The out of the box report script can’t export reports where the report name contains one or more spaces. Technote 1511759 explains how to overcome this.
Developer Tip -> Use the underscore ( _ ) character instead of spaces in the report names.
There is another command to extract groups of, or single, reports and that uses the same configuration file as this one and almost certainly uses the same Java code. If you want to learn more about this tool then read the Maximo Report developers guide. This is the link to the 7.6 guide but I don’t think the syntax has changed much between the versions.
Developer Tip -> A later article will encourage you to read section 6.6 Closing the Data set…
Failure to export reports because of missing reportdesign entries
A number of Maximo releases have suffered from a problem where some of the box reports are not correctly defined in Maximo. The reports have entries in the REPORT table but the design is not in the REPORTDESIGN table.
If you try to export these reports then the export will fail with a NullPointerException because of the missing REPORTDESIGN entry. Some releases have at least 10 OOB reports with this problem.
Technote 1632213 suggests either importing the missing reports or deleting the entries.
use select action->import report to import the relevant file from the build server
The export would need to be run again and the tool’s design means that it would try to export all the reports and fail at the next one. That report would then need to be deleted/imported and the export restarted.
By the time you have found / corrected all the problem reports some reports will have been exported over 10 times … The further you get down the list the more reports that will have been exported again and again…
Unfortunately the tool isn’t designed just to report the error and proceed to export the next report. Readers may wish to raise an RFE to ask for this change or you could read on for a workaround…
Workaround to Quickly Find Reports with a Missing REPORTDESIGN Entry
Time is money so here is my workaround that to find these problem reports.
- Go to the report administration application
- Go to the list view
- Edit the where clause to read as follows: not exists ( select 1 from reportdesign where (reportname=report.reportname))
- This will return a list of reports that are incorrectly defined.
You can then decide if you want to import the report or delete the report.
Tip -> If the system has been in use for a prolonged period of time then it may be more appropriate to delete the offending report entries because users have not seen the reports.
Tip -> The export quick process is quick, so export the reports after the first installation and after every upgrade. Play it safe and don’t assume that every report is there.
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