Remus Information Management

Remus Information Management is a client application based on Eclipse and the Framework Eclipse
Remus. It provides a simple way to store daily used data, search functionality, desktop-integration and a
synchronization mechanism with remote repositories, online services and social platforms. Eclipse
Remus is a framework to build data-centric desktop- or web-applications with Standard Eclipse
Technologies.

BIRT in Remus Information Management

An important requirement was the delivery of a reporting framework due to the following reasons:

1. Stored data must be interpretable in different contexts. This context is mostly user specific and
cannot be preset by the application. As a result the user must have the ability to create views on
data which satisfies his needs.

2. The most convenient method to produce output is through an html-template engine. This
engine is used to produce simple easy to read output but is not suitable for complex reports, like
diagrams, complex tables, grouping.

Based on the mentioned challenges the decision was made to integrate the BIRT Engine into the
application.

Two-Level BIRT Integration

To make the usage of BIRT as easy as possible, Remus integrates BIRT in two different ways:

1. Runtime Integration: The specific Remus ODA Driver connects the Remus-Workspace to the
Reporting engine and makes a seamless integration possible. Developers and adaptors of the
Remus Framework have the possibility to deliver BIRT reports under the hood as primary output
format without any BIRT Designer fragments (see Figure 1 Twitter Statistics as embed BIRT
Report).

2. BIRT Editor Integration: With the Information Type “Report” Remus provides the possibility for
users to create their own reports. In this case the BIRT Designer is shipped within the
application. The major difference between the original BIRT Designer is the information specific
focus of designing reports. While you work directly on rptdesign files in the BIRT Designer,
Remus embeds an rptdesign file into the editing information unit and hides the technical details
of files and resources from the user (see Figure 2 Report Designer with a back-link of the
appended information unit.
The advantages of BIRT-Integration for our customers
Customers and adopters using the Remus framework have automatically a support for visualizing their
data in their business-specific way with the BIRT Engine and can edit their report-templates without
delivering new versions of their software. In addition it minimizes the barrier of non technology users to
create BIRT datasets due to the similar data representation of the ODA Driver and the default data
representation of Remus. The functionalities of Remus and BIRT are playing very well together and
provide the user new functionalities of Reporting Intelligence, e.g. searching full text in reports, online-
sharing of Report-templates or a one click report-generation through Remus’ desktop-integration. This
makes Remus more attractive for users and adopters and demonstrates the powerful functionality of
BIRT and its easy integration into 3rd party frameworks and applications.

The Remus development-team believes in the power of OpenSource and made all work available under
the terms of the Eclipse Public License.

Contact
Tom Seidel – tom.seidel@remus-software.org
http://www.remus-software.org
http://www.eclipse.org/remus
Appendix

Figure 1 Twitter Statistics as embed BIRT Report

Figure 2 Report Designer with a back-link of the appended information unit