What is the right way to initialize the BIRT runtime?

[Miurath]

We are testing the current birt snapshot with our unaltered code (previously using birt release 4.4.2).
Currently, we start the BIRT / eclipse framework in the following way:

EngineConfig engineConfig_ = new EngineConfig(); engineConfig_.setResourcePath(resourcePath); Platform.startup(engineConfig_);
[...]
reportEngine_ = new ReportEngine(engineConfig_); reportRunnable_ = reportEngine_.openReportDesign(this.reportDesign_);
[...]
runAndRenderTask_ = reportEngine_ .createRunAndRenderTask(reportRunnable_)
[...]
runAndRenderTask_.run();

In consequence (and in contrast to 4.4.2) we are now getting an:

java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.pdf.PDFRender.createPageDevice(PDFRender.java:62) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.layout.emitter.PageDeviceRender.start(PageDeviceRender.java:111) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.layout.emitter.PageEmitter.start(PageEmitter.java:50) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.nLayout.LayoutEngine.start(LayoutEngine.java:265) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.CompositeContentEmitter.start(CompositeContentEmitter.java:171) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.impl.RunAndRenderTask.doRun(RunAndRenderTask.java:140) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.impl.RunAndRenderTask.run(RunAndRenderTask.java:65) [...] Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException at org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.InternalPlatform.getBundles(InternalPlatform.java:232) at org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.InternalPlatform.getBundle(InternalPlatform.java:222) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Platform.getBundle(Platform.java:1442) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.internal.util.BundleVersionUtil.getBundleVersion(BundleVersionUtil.java:33) at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.emitter.pdf.PDFPageDevice.<clinit>(PDFPageDevice.java:84) ... 17 more

What are we doing wrong / what has changed since 4.4.2?

[wimjongman]

This is the correct way, only the current BIRT snapshots are not ready yet.

[wimjongman]

Please try again with the latest snapshot. Please note that all our report engine tests are running without issues. Please take a look at the tests and compare your way of running with what is in the tests.

[patric-r]

Ah, okay....

What is left in order to use the runtime?

How can we currently test BIRT report PDF generation at all?
We would like to use the designer to create a preview PDF but as we all know, the preview is currently not working.
Therefore we switched to the runtime...

[wimjongman]

Use 4.8 or follow PR #733 for instructions on how to get the preview engine running.

[patric-r]

@wimjongman Thanks for the PR and good to know that we have progress regarding the report viewer but how does the report viewer relate to the BIRT runtime?
I assumed that the report viewer is not involved at all when creating reports/PDFs by using the BIRT runtime.

[wimjongman]

Correct, I updated the comment

[patric-r]

Okay, thanks.
What is left in order to get the BIRT runtime running?

[hvbtup]

Same issue here - the issue #781 I reported is probably a duplicate.

[hvbtup]

An obvious change to to genReport.bat is to replace the FOR statment to construct BIRT_CLASSPATH with the much more simple

set BIRTCLASSPATH=%WORK_DIR%\lib\*

in both versions of genReport.bat (runtime and runtime-osgi).

Note that the OSGI runtime isn't working, too!

With Java 11 and the command line

genReport.bat -m runrender -o x.pdf samples\hello_world.rptdesign

I get dozens or hundreds of error messages

Error Processing: org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.extensionlocation.SiteListener@485fa69: java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Not able to create StateObjectFactory implementation: org.eclipse.osgi.internal.resolver.StateObjectFactoryImpl

and finally
(datetime). org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.ReportRunner execute
SEVERE: exception in parsing the paramters
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.ReportRunner.execute(ReportRunner.java:139)
at org.eclipse.birt.report.engine.api.ReportRunner.main(ReportRunner.java:119)

This is also described in https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=547526

[hvbtup]

To answer the initial question:
You are doing it the right way - you are running into an issue with the BIRT runtime (#781).
Wim fixed this (partially) with #788. However, if your report is using JDBC, you'll probably run into another issue, for which Wim created a PR in another Eclipse project (#781 (comment)).
This means that a complete fix of the POJO runtime has to wait until 2022/03.

[wimjongman]

Actually, it might be a bit sooner ;)

[wimjongman]

We are now hooked into the nightly builds of Eclipse 4.23 via this repository [1]. A new build is now spinning which should be finished in a couple of minutes [2].

[1] https://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.23-I-builds/
[2] https://github.com/eclipse/birt/actions/runs/1750448182