Birt Report with Dynamic Column

Question

I want to create a Birt table report with dynamic number of columns from xml datasource. How can I go about it ?

While searching I have read that it can be done with scripted datasource but I couldn't find example or documentation of how to use scripted datasource with xml datasource.

I have also tried cross tab which only seems to work if there is some form aggregation (it doesn't work with strings).

Here is a sample xml:

    <table>
    <row>
       <name></name>
       <question_1>answer<question_1>
       <question_2>answer<question_2>
    </row>
<!-- or it can be like this. I can control how the xml is generated-->
    <row>
       <name></name>
       <question>answer<question>
       <question>answer<question>
    </row>
    </table>

the number of questions is different for different xml but they are the same for the rows within one xml. I want the data to appear in tabular form like this

name | question_1 | question_2

Create a data set from your xml data source and create a data cube. You can link the data cube into a cross-tab. Follow this tutorial to create a cross-tab. Only difference is it has jdbc data source. All the other steps are same. — AkilaMK

Dominique Dominique · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-17T10:38:47

As you mentionned it in the question, i think the easiest way to do this is a crosstab. Indeed datacubes work with numeric measures but we can workaround it by creating a dummy measure with the field "answer" as expression in the underlying datacube. Set the type of the measure to "String" and the aggregate function to "FIRST" , then the crosstab should display the answer of each question in cells

Birt Report with Dynamic Column

2 Answers