Hello BIRT-men,
it has been a bit silent in this forum over the last year, and I want to apologize for that. It has been a very busy year with so many things on the agenda, so all BIRT-men had quite a hard time.
This year we are going to change that, and I would like to start a series of articles based on experiences from the field. Let's start with a short article and example on the usage of multiple master-pages in a report design.
Definition
The BIRT designer allows you to define one or more master pages in a design or report library. As least one must exist, you cannot remove it. The first master page in the design is chosen as the default one. You can define pages with predefined dimension and landscape/portrait orientation or define an arbitrary custom size.
Usage
As mentioned, the first master-page is used as the default. You can switch the master-page at any time, for example to switch from landscape to portrait or vice versa, by setting the master-page at any report element. That element would be the first to appear on the selected master-page. You can find this setting in the "Page Break" tab.
Note that you do not see different master pages in the report designer directly unfortunately. Anyway, most attributes of the master-page as background color or background images are rendered also in the editor.
Watermark
In the attached example you will find a solution how to use a watermark image on the master-page, as an example a "Draft" image here which is pretty nice. However, the settings to accomplish that are not self-explaining. During a recent workshop we had some trouble to do so but finally succeeded. The trick was to put the background image next to the design file and change a few settings. Works for PDF as well as DOCX.
There are many more things a master-page can define (footer, header etc.). Would be glad to hear your experience and opinion on that topic.
Become a BIRT-man soon!
Jan
