Great Idea

[Scott]

I like it, really nice idea.

One thought, it may make sense to look at the way that parameters are
attached to the run. When running a report you will typically have a
separate set of parameters for each rptdesign that you run.

[Roman]

Hi Scott,
thank you for your feedback.
I was also thinking about it a lot and decided to make the task as
simplest as possible.
If I understand the case you described well, you can solve it simply
defining two or more different runs for two or more groups of reports
with different set of parameters. The performance of course goes down
then because the BIRT platform have to be started up twice but
simplicity is simplicity ;-)

br,
Roman

[Scott Rosenbaum]

Roman,

My thought is to add building some reports for test as part of the ant run.  I would really want to avoid the re-start on the ReportEngine since it is fairly heavy weight.  In addition, the scenario we are testing is where we start one ReportEngine and run multiple tasks.

My thought would be that you have something like this:

  <target name="generate.reports" ><!-- ReportEngine attributes -->

    <birtReport mode="run" outputdir="${basedir}/bin/reports" format="html">
      <input>
        <fileset dir="${basedir}/src/reports">
          <include name="**/*.rptdesign" />
        </fileset>
      </input>
      <param name="project.url" value="http://www.dailydev.org/p/birt-ant-task" />
    </birtReport>
    <!-- another EngineTask -->
    <birtReport mode="render" outputdir="${basedir}/bin/reports" format="html">
      <input>
        <fileset dir="${basedir}/src/reports">
          <include name="**/*.rptdocument" />
        </fileset>
      </input>
    </birtReport>
    <!-- another EngineTask -->
    <birtReport mode="render" outputdir="${basedir}/bin/reports" format="pdf">
      <input>
        <fileset dir="${basedir}/src/reports">
          <include name="**/*.rptdocument" />
        </fileset>
      </input>
    </birtReport>

  </target>

I realize this is a bit 'thicker' Ant task than is customary, but I think it would work well for BIRT.

scott