Generate an HTML report with BIRT from an HTML Template

Question

In a project I'm working on, we're using BIRT to generate some HTML reports from some XML Traces.

However these reports are pretty simple and ugly and we wish to improve them. We made a mockup/template in HTML/CSS (and some JavaScript that we want to be embedded in each reports) but now that we're happy with the design, there seem to be a problem (that we should have seen before):

Can we use this template with BIRT? AFAIK, we have to design the birt template using birt's tools ; and it'll be a lot of (useless) work to do so, and we're not even sure we'll be able to obtain the same design with birt as we tweaked things very tightly with CSS.

Answer 1

You can give bookmarks to all of your visualizations in the BIRT report and then use the JavaScript API to display the content in your template. Alternatively, if you are building even the visualization in the HTML template, you can use the REST API to extract data into JSON format and then visualize that as you like in your HTML pages.

You could also load the external CSS file with the BIRT report.