title: Configuring & Generating BIRT Reports Dynamically
body: <p>From watching the 2-part YouTube videos and perusing the BIRT manual, my understanding of it is the the worflow goes something like this:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Create a new Report in Eclipse</li>
  <li>Use the BIRT Report Designer (Eclipse plug-in) to design a report</li>
  <li>Populate the report with Data Sources (JDBC drivers &amp; databases) and Data Sets (specific tables)</li>
  <li>Generate/export/print the report</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>As cool as this tool seems to be, I cannot find <em>any</em> documentation that leads me to believe that this is a <strong>Java</strong> tool and not an <strong>Eclipse-only</strong> tool (meaning, it has a Java API and can interact with Java apps, as opposed to a pure Eclipe plug-in which requires manual/human interaction from the Eclipse IDE.</p>
  
  <p>Specifically, I want to confirm that BIRT either can or cannot do the following:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Configure a report (layout, UI widget placement, data sources/sets, etc.) programmatically; i.e. in the same way that JasperReport API has the iReport designer that generates JRXML, is the same true for BIRT?</li>
  <li>Kick off a report "generation" through a Java API whereby data gets read-in realtime and populates the report and the report can be sent out or stored on a file system</li>
  <li>Create HTML and PDF versions of the same report</li>
  </ul>