Integrate XLS emitter with standalone Java applications

Since many people asked how to integrate the XLS emitter with standalone java applications or servlet environtment, I investigated a little on this.

Unfortunately, Current BIRT framework can't handle the new OSGi form plugins when running in a standalone mode(e.g. not in eclipse workbench/rcp). So the resolution is just to downgrade the plugin manifest file to the old style plugin.xml.

For testing, I used an handy report framework introduced by Mark Lorenz, and everything looks fine.

The example just shows how to integrate the emitter with a standard file ouput. To support servlet environment, you can simply redirect the output to an OutputStream and specify a proper mime type ("application/vnd.ms-excel" for this case). The birt newsgroup already hosts a lot discussions on how to integrate birt with the servlet environment.

Download integration example: http://qauck.host.sk/standalone-integration.zip