If you're thinking about making some cool charts for your Birt reports, one of the first decisions you'll have to make is which output format to use. The choices are PNG, JPG, BMP, SVG. If the report doesn't need to feature any interactive features, you could pick JPG or BMP. To take advantage of the interactive features of Birt, you'll need to choose between PNG or SVG. And that's where things get a little more complicated, because different browsers render the interactive features of PNG and SVG differently. Also, some interactive features work differently in SVG than PNG.
First, read up on PNG and SVG on Wikipedia to get a little background. One of the things you'll find out is that SVG is not supported by IE 8 and only marginally by IE 9. However, I've noticed that some Birt interactive chart features don't work even in browsers that 'support' SVG. There is an adobe plug-in for IE that allows it to support SVG, but I'd like to avoid plug-ins if possible. Read more about browser support for SVG
here, where some saint is documenting the results of performing 280 different tests on every known web browser.
For the reasons described above, I started using PNG. There were a couple cool interactive features that were supported by PNG, but it seemed like the best fit.
So here are the features I like best. I like to show tooltips on Mouse Over. This will allow some additional data to show up in a little window when the user hovers the mouse pointer over a data point. I find this useful because it's always a challenge to fit everything on the chart and this is a way to make the chart as big as possible while still allowing the user to get some more contextual information. As an example, let's say the y-axis is ae_s_bld_c.bldg, which is a building number or address. Because not all your users can quickly perform the mental translation from building number/address to building description, you could flash the more commonly known building description as a tool tip.
Another application for the tooltips would be when a chart has been made that normalizes the data based on percentage and you could use the tool tip to show the actual count of work orders, for example. You could also stitch a couple of these together into the same tool tip.
The other feature that I really like is hyperlink. You can drill-through from the chart report to another chart report or text report or right into a browse or individual record in the Aim application. You can see another article that I've written on that topic
here.
I'll get some pictures up when I get a chance, plus some examples of the tooltips and hyperlinks code.
