Presenter: Rachita Bhatia

Creating BIRT Reports for Maximo

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About the Presenter: Rachita Bhatia

Rachita Bhatia is an Application Consultant at Ontracks’ Canadian practice in the Edmonton office. Rachita is an EIT and gained her Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta. As an experienced Maximo consultant, she has a deep expertise in BIRT reporting, SQL, automation scripting and data integration. Rachita is also an IBM Certified Maximo Deployment Professional and has worked on various projects for clients in the Oil & Gas and transportation industries.

Questions on Maximo? Contact Rachita directly at:

Email: rbhatia@ontracksconsulting.com

Phone: 780-637-4130 ext 241

Agenda

• Overview of the BIRT Designer

• Creating A New BIRT Report for Maximo

• Importing Reports into Maximo

• Modifying Existing Reports Using BIRT

• Demo

• Questions

Reporting in Maximo

• Two types of reports in Maximo – Query based reports, and BIRT reports

• Query-based reports (Ad Hoc Reports) are set up in Maximo in the Object Structures application. They give the user freedom to choose what fields they want to report on.

• There are limitations to QBRs in terms of formatting, calculations, viewing data in a graphical form etc.

• This is where BIRT reports are more useful. These are set up outside of Maximo and imported into the application.

BIRT Reports

• BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool) reports are saved into Maximo and can be ran from the application at any given time to provide up to date information about a chosen set of records.

• These reports cannot be edited dynamically. • To add or remove a field on the BIRT report, or to modify

its appearance, we open the “report design file” in a software called the BIRT Designer.

• Out of the box, Maximo comes with saved reports for every application. These reports have their design files saved in the SMP directory and we can import these reports into BIRT designer to modify them.

BIRT Designer

Creating a BIRT Report

• Maximo comes with a set of templates and style sheets that can be used as a starting point for creating BIRT reports. These templates ensure uniformity with existing reports, and provide the scripting classes needed for report integration.

• After BIRT designer is set up and the Maximo library is imported, we can create a new report by choosing one of the templates.

• Once we have the blank template open, we next need to add data to it. This data comes from the tables stored in the Maximo database.

Creating a BIRT Report – contd.

• For adding data to the report, gather all the columns we’d like to see on the report in the form of a SQL query. The best way to do this would be to use SSMS for SQL Server or SQL Developer for an Oracle Database.

• Once our query is formed, and we have tested that it returns the desired result set, we set up the query in BIRT.

• Then we specify the columns to be fetched from the database into the report, add those columns to the report layout and set the desired format.

• We can also preview our reports in BIRT before importing them to Maximo.

Importing Reports into Maximo

• Once we are satisfied with how our reports looks in BIRT, we can then import it into Maximo using the Report Administration application.

Modifying Existing Reports

• If we want to add or remove columns from existing reports in Maximo, we can open the report design files in BIRT and modify the SQL query for the existing report.

• We can also extend existing Ad hoc reports by exporting them from the Maximo database and adding more information to them.

Helpful Tips for Modifying BIRT Reports

• To export a report from the Maximo database, use this query and copy/paste the result into a notepad, then save it with a .rptdesign extension – you can now open it in BIRT Designer: – Select CAST(design as XML) from reportdesign where

reportname = ‘<reportname.rptdesign>’

• If the long description of an attribute in Maximo has rich text formatting or HTML tags, those can be displayed in the BIRT report by using the Dynamic Text element.

• We can add conditional formatting such as highlighting duplicates by adding Java code to the reports.

• Always remember to take a backup of the existing report design file before editing it, since the BIRT designer automatically saves the file when we switch to the XML/Preview tabs.

BIRT Demo

Questions?

Thank you!

For questions, please contact Rachita Bhatia at: 780-637-4130 ext 241 or rbhatia@ontracksconsulting.com