We recently stumbled over a strange issue: a report, that basically lists just a set of links to other reports, was working nicely on English o German OS but produced broken links for example for Japanese OS. The behavior was strange and puzzled us, because all data source and data set related code was working correctly.
The report was using a simple text report item with content type set to HTML, in order to render some dynamic hyperlink.
After a longer search for the root cause, it turned out that a somewhat hidden BIRT feature was causing the problem: its was "JTidy". JTidy is a well know library to "clean up" HTML code, so basically make it compliant and strict. This option is enabled by default and it seemed that JTidy somewhat did not like non ASCII characters in HTML links. However, he attempt to encode the link was basically corrupting it.
The fix was to disable JTidy for this specific text field. You can find the setting only in the "Advanced" tab:
So whenever you stumble over some strange issue with hyperlinks, you may remember this solution.
Happy Reporting
Jan
