Data in a data source can sometimes be cryptic or appear in abbreviated form. For example, gender values may be M or F rather than male or female. Credit rankings may be 1 to 5 rather than excellent, good, average, fair, or poor.
BIRT Report Designer enables you to specify alternate values to display if you do not want to use the original values in your report. You use a data element’s map property to create rules for mapping data values. You create one map rule for each data value that you want to replace. For example, to map M and F to Male and Female, respectively, you create two map rules.
You can replace a data value with a literal text value. Alternatively, if you are creating a report that will be viewed in multiple locales, you can replace a data value with a resource key. A resource key is a text string in an external source that is translated, or localized, into different languages. Resource keys and localization are discussed in
Chapter 20, “Localizing Text.”
Figure 7‑21 shows an example of a completed map rule, which replaces the value A with the value Excellent.
6
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Repeat steps
3 through
5 to create additional rules, one for each data value that you want to replace.
Figure 7‑23 shows an example of three map rules that were created for the selected data element.
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