以编程方式从Web-Viewer生成和检索BIRT报告

Question

I've installed BIRT Web-Viewer on my server and am able to build the report with this URL:

http://hostname:port/birt/run?__report=test.rptdesign

Now I need to programmatically call this URL from my Java Code and retrieve the result as stream or file.

Is there any API for the Web-Viewer?
If not, could I just call the URL like this and extract the PDF?:

HttpClient httpClient = HttpClients.createDefault();
HttpGet postRequest = new HttpPost("http://hostname:port/birt/run");
List<NameValuePair> formData = new ArrayList<>();
formData.add(new BasicNameValuePair("__report", "test.rptdesign"));
HttpEntity entity = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(formData);
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(postRequest);

Answer 1

I found out, if I use the __format parameter with the value pdf , the response to the request is the PDF content, which is exactly what I wanted.

The standard response is a HTML, which will be returned with a second request. I'm pretty sure that response has to be retrieved with sessions.

Edit: As requested I will post my request code. I modified it a bit, because I used some custom classes to hold configuration and the report.

public InputStream getReport() throws Exception {
  StringBuilder urlBuilder = new StringBuilder()
      .append("http://example.com:9080/contextRoot/run")
      .append("?__report=ReportDesign.rptdesign&__format=pdf");

  if (reportParameters != null) {
    for (Map.Entry<String, String> parameter : reportParameters.entrySet()) {
      String key = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(parameter.getKey());
      String value = StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(parameter.getValue());

      urlBuilder.append('&')
          .append(key);
          .append('=');
          .append(value);
    }
  }

  URL requestUrl = new URL(burlBuilder.toString());
  HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) requestUrl.openConnection();
  connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
  connection.setDoInput(true);
  connection.connect();

  return connection.getInputStream();
}

I also had another method write the used data as XML to the file system before I called requestUrl.openConnection() , but I think this is only necessary if you use very dynamic data like I did.