Debugging BIRT reports can be a pain if you don’t know where to start looking.  You can’t set breakpoints in your report and step through your javascript code, but this code snippet will help with all your report writing needs.

One thing that is hard to debug is SQL queries in BIRT.  Sometimes we can write SQL and have some syntax errors in our reports, but when you try to preview the report, the error message is far from informative as to the real reason it’s failing.  So the best way to debug reports is to add this code snippet to your javascript “initialize” method.

mxReportScriptContext.setDefaultLogLevel(“DEBUG”);
mxReportScriptContext.setDefaultLogFile(“c:/temp/myBIRTReport.log”);
scriptLogger = mxReportScriptContext.getReportScriptLogger();

if (scriptLogger.isDebugEnabled())
{
scriptLogger.debug(“Message”);
}

This snippet will create a temp file that will output any debug information you want to display.  Also, if you have happen to have a syntax error in your SQL statement, this log file will show you that error, or whatever error it is.