In some cases it might be required to hide a dynamically filled table, if for whatever reason, that table would contain no entries. For example: your report is supposed to show a table for functional requirements, and one for technical requirements. The report shall NOT show the table if here are no functional, resp. technical requirements at all in the project. You may transfer this idea to the whole chapter if you like.
For this problem BIRT introduces a very simple solution, which is a function call
Total.count()
That call will return the number of effective rows whenever used inside of a table or list context. I prepared an example to illustrate that. The example has the well known data source providing a number of persons with ID and name.
There are 4 table sin the report based on the DS, the first shows all persons. he second uses a filter to show only a few persons, the third and the fourth use a filter that effectively filter out all persons. The third shows zero rows while the fourth is hidden from the report in case there are no rows.
Happy Reporting
Jan
