Preparing data for use with the BIRT Report Designer

Before you can begin to create a BIRT report, you need to prepare your data in the DITA Perspective.

The process begins with a personal TEXTML query, which you can save from the Search view. This establishes the broad framework of the information you want to extract from the Content Store. For example, you might run a query on all topics that are in the Localization cycle. You could then edit that query to restrict your search to a specific set of topics: concepts, for example.

The next step is to create a data set definition, based on this query, to extract specific information such as the number of times each topic is going through review. Or to find the number of auto-translated segments in each topic.

Once you've created your data set definition, you can use it to output the data source file. IXIASOFT CCMS creates its data source files in TSV format. These are the files that you select from the Report Design Perspective when you create a new data source for a report.