Maximo BIRT - Course Curriculum

Course Overview

This three-day training course focuses on the tasks that are common to most Maximo report developers. We start with an introduction of the core development environment and then move into a variety of report building techniques that are common to real-world Maximo report development requirements.

 

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Prerequisites

No experience necessary, however some report building experience, familiarity with the Maximo data model, SQL and javascript is beneficial.

Format

Instructor-led lectures accompanied by hands-on lab exercises, examples, and tutorials.

Course Materials

Participants receive lab exercises, as well as links to other resources and code downloads.

Course Outline

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Getting Started With BIRT

This section is the foundation of the course and is designed for users who are just getting started in BIRT report development or want to enhance existing knowledge. This section is designed to leave a student comfortable working within the BIRT environment and with a solid understanding of the core components needed to create basic BIRT reports.  Key terminology and functionality of BIRT that is built on in the following modules is introduced. The following topics are covered in this section:

  • Introduction: The BIRT designer interface
  • BIRT Report Development Process
  • Data Preparation for BIRT
  • Layout of BIRT reports
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Styles & Expressions

This section is a continuation of the Getting Started with BIRT module and focuses on report formatting and the multitude of ways expressions are used to create BIRT reports. As with any report development, the presentation and styling of information is almost as important as the data itself. BIRT allows many ways to incorporate styles, from style sheets to individual control changes; this section will teach students how to give reports a finished look.


Expressions are used in many areas of BIRT report development; from creating Data Sources to building Charts and incorporating Parameters. This section teaches students how expression functions can help solve roadblocks that may arise in report development. The following topics are covered in this section:

  • Formatting Reports
  • BIRT Styles
  • BIRT Expressions
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BIRT Event Handlers

BIRT provides an event driven framework for report customization.  For Maximo BIRT development, event handlers are particularly important since all Maximo reports require JavaScript event handlers to acquire data.  This section introduces the BIRT event model and provides guidance on how to take advantage of the event model to make reports look and behave in desired ways. The following topics are covered in this section:
  • Event Sequence
  • Javascript Event Handlers
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Maximo Reporting Intro

Maximo plug-ins and BIRT work together to allow you to create custom reports based on Maximo data structure. Up to now the focus has been on the standard version of BIRT as implemented with Maximo. This next section will guide students through adding the Maximo configurations. Utilizing the skills and knowledge acquired in previous sections, students will be able to successfully create Maximo Data Sets. This section assumes that the developers have a basic understanding of the Maximo data structure. The following topics are covered in this section:
  • Maximo Configuration
  • Maximo Datasets
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Best Practice Maximo BIRT Development

Innovent has found that there are a number of best practices that can simplify and ease the Maximo report development process.  Innovent presents these techniques so that students can be more productive when developing reports. The following topics are covered in this section:
  • Best Practices for Maximo BIRT
  • Libraries
  • Deploying Maximo BIRT Reports – Start to Finish Procedures
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Advanced Topics

An effective report is one where the user can understand information that is presented and navigate to additional information when needed. This may be as simple as creating the ability to drill through reports using hyperlinks or by nesting an additional table of information into an existing table. Where language may be a barrier in reading a report; adding Localization can remove the barrier. The following topics are covered in this section:

  • Nesting and Subquery
  • Hyperlinks
  • Localization
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Customizing Maximo Reports

Up to this point we’ve been creating reports from scratch, but what about those pre-designed reports that are delivered with Maximo? Can those be modified? Time will be spent looking at a sample of the pre-designed reports that come with Maximo.  We will take a few of the provided Maximo reports and walk through the process of extracting them, making changes and re-deploying. The following topics are covered in this section:

  • Out-of-box Maximo Reports Tour
  • Extracting Existing Reports
  • Customizing Out-of-box Maximo Reports
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BIRT Features

BIRT provides report developers a host of features that can be used to meet unique real-world reporting requirements.  This section will teach students how to access and incorporate data from multiple sources as well as present data in a pivot format. The following topics are covered in this section:

  • Joint Data Sets
  • Data Cubes and Cross Tabs
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BIRT Charts

BIRT provides a powerful charting package that can be used to display data visually.  This section introduces BIRT charting with a focus on how to create the various chart types through visual interfaces. After learning the core components used to create charts, we delve into how to add features that allow users to interact with charts. The following topics are covered in this section:

  • Chart Types
  • Chart Data
  • Chart Formatting
  • Chart Interactivity
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