Actuate BIRT best practices v1 0

1. Actuate tool
&
best practices
Prepared By:
CEAS Actuate Report Team

2. Introduction & Target audience
The purpose of this document is to provide some basic guidelines and best practices,
that should be used while using the Actuate Reporting tool.
The target audience of this document are experienced Actuate Developers.

3. Why Actuate & How it works
• Actuate is an reporting tool used to design and develop the web based reports. The
main advantages are it is easy to use, and its programmability.
• Actuate reports can be viewed from Actuate End User Desktop and/or from any of
the web based server on which actuate server is installed. With the help of Actuate
Web Agent, the reports can be viewed from any web client.
• Security is the next big advantage of Actuate. Administrator can fix security of each
report by using Actuate Administrative Desktop. With the help of page level security,
administrator can easily manage the various security level.
• Centralized Report management is possible by Actuate Administrative Desktop.

4. Best Practices in Actuate
• Internationalization
Actuate 6 and onwards, is the only truly internationalized Enterprise Reporting
Application Platform that supports key global application business scenarios such as:
– Deliver content in multiple languages from a single server. An example is a
central data warehouse that stores data for different geographies in different
languages. A single Actuate server can generate reports against these different
language databases. Generate a report that contains data in multiple languages.
– Format and deliver information for multiple locales from a single server. All
users receive reports formatted in their own languages with their country’s date
and time formats. Support Report development across geographies: With
Actuate 6, reports developed in one language can be delivered in another: An
example is a U.S.A.-based development group that designs corporate reports
using the English version of the e.Report Designer. These reports can then be
deployed to a Chinese version of the server to generate Chinese reports.
– Ability to specify a language or cultural context while viewing or printing a
report. This can save significant amounts of processing time and disk space
compared to generating separate reports for each locale.
– With Actuate 6, Internationalization support has become a core design principle
and we have enhanced every aspect of our product to provide a pure foundation
for global deployment.

5. Best Practices in Actuate
• Workflow Management
To make it easier for users to create reports, e.Report Designer
Professional’s new user interface breaks the design process down into a
set of steps. Each step allows the user to accomplish a particular stage of
the report development. This focus on the design steps helps guide the
user and makes navigation much easier. Each step will have its own fully
customizable and persisted workspace layout, called a “perspective.” This
provides a flexible environment, allowing users with different levels of
experience to customize the window layout of each report creation step to
suit their individual needs. e.Report Designer Professional has four
perspectives: data, design, debug, and view. Each perspective has its own
set of menus, windows, and toolbars, all arranged with the perspective’s
report development task in mind.

6. Best Practices in Actuate
• User-Friendly and Flexible Window Handling
Instead of the previous MDI window handling where windows tend to
overlap each other, the new user interface is based on a flexible window
handling model that supports both docking and floating windows (known
as “panes”). A typical workspace configuration for the design perspective
will have the property sheet, output window, structure view, and other
windows docked around the edges of the workspace, and the “main views”
(layout view, code editor, etc.) will be presented in the main working area
with one tab per view or file. The workspace configuration is completely
flexible, such that each user can tailor it to his or her preferences. For
example, windows can be combined into one pane with one tab per
window and individual tabs can be “torn off” and made into a separate
pane. e.Report Designer Professional remembers the workspace
configuration so that it will remain the same even after switching between
various perspectives or closing the application.

7. Best Practices in Actuate
• Sorting & Grouping
The Chart Builder has been enhanced to provide users with an easy-to-use
interface to define advanced grouping and date/time series in charts. The
interface has powerful features that allow report developers to specify how
they want to group series or category data and define dynamic as well as
static groups. For example, using a few mouse clicks, report developers
can specify the grouping interval to be day or week or month, identify
certain days like holidays to be excluded from being plotted, and so forth.
Based on their requirements, customers can define grouping on integer,
text and date/time data types.

8. Best Practices in Actuate
• Rename the components properly so that Report designer & Global Browser remain
in synch & we can map the components in-between.
• While deleting any component from designer delete in with Shift+Del or else the
component will lie in Global Browser and can create further problem.
• Use the ‘Verify Design’ facility under Report tab of designer to check the design for
consistency errors.
• Use the ‘Publish to Library’ & Global Library facilities to utilize the concept of
reusability in the report.
• Override the ‘MaintainanceHistory( )’ method of the AcReport component with the
appropriate comments & changes tracking.
• Take appropriate care while initializing & assigning the report parameters & also
nullify/reinitialize the parameters at appropriate ‘Finish’ method of the components.

9. Best Practices in Actuate
• Tracking of overrides:
As the Actuate Designer does not provide a way of easily finding the
methods that have been overridden in the Report Design, it is better if
there is a document tagged to each report design that mentions (even for
the controls on the Library) the customizations ( changes in the default
properties like alignment/font/etc) and Overriding (changes in the default
Behavior). The same document would also mention the global variables
being used in the code, so that any extension of the component (library)
does not malfunction after it is instantiated and the library is removed.
• Display Text:
For the Text/Dynamic Text/Number controls, providing display text in the
Sample Value Property makes the report design easier to understand.
Instead of selecting the individual control to see the Value Expression, one
shall be able to understand the Field being referred to by the control by
reading the Sample Value.

10. Best Practices in Actuate
• Ability to Specify Database Connections in a Configuration File
Following best practices, Actuate customers typically use multi-stage
deployment environments, which have completely separate but logically
identical environments for development, testing, and production. Strict
internal policies govern how applications are delivered to production, and
typically disallow modification and recompilation after the testing phase.
• Coding Standards and Review:
Standards need to be more comprehensive and “design conventions”,
“naming conventions – coding” and “naming conventions – controls” have
to be identified, so that the Report designs are easier to comprehend. The
standards would also include other additives like “indentation”, “spacing”,
“line-length for code”, “comments to elaborate the code”, “comments for
version tracking”, etc.

11. Features under Actuate Reports
A few other major features of Actuate designer are as follows:
• Avoiding Duplicate Rows
• Writing Output To Text file
• Easier to Format “Date” Information When Exported to Excel
• Actuate Page-Level Security
• Display Control Only Once.
• Charting.
• e.Reporting for Multiple Locales
• Designing reports with page level security

12. Features under Actuate Reports
• With Actuate, you can create Web pages that display data without writing
a single line of code.
• Actuate solution is faster to build as a result less development efforts with
low maintenance costs.
• Reports can be generated in various format like PDF, excel, text etc.
• Easy integration with any relational database like Oracle, Sybase, MS-
Access.
• Actuate e.Reporting offers full support for cached content. Content can be
generated ahead of time and does not need to be recreated when
requested by the user. This in turns reduce the query execution time.

13. Features under Actuate Reports
• Any content generated by Actuate is available in Adobe PDF format.
• Actuate administrator can easily set up individual users and specify the
content to which they should have access.
• Actuate e.Reporting offers built-in support for generating charts and
graphs from data, while building charts and graphs on the fly for displaying
on Web pages requires special extensions to C or Perl.
• Actuate e.Reporting offers built-in support for grouping data and
performing summary calculations
• Great-looking content can be easily build for end-users without writing
lines of code.

14. References
• Actuate Guidelines and Best Practices.doc: This document will give
the details of all best practices and there way of implementation.
• Actuate_8_Summary_of_New_Features.pdf: Document gives the
generic idea about the new featured/best practices introduced under
Actuate version 8.
• ActuatevsBuilding.pdf : Details of how caching happens under Actuate
and its respective benefits.