"New Preview Prototype" tab

[colinsutton]

With the birt-report-designer-all-in-one-4.15.0-202403111050-macosx.cocoa.aarch64 an undocumented "New Preview Prototype" tab appears in the UI.

I can see code was added in 2007, but the tab did not appear in release 4.9, for example.

[speckyspooky]

What is here the question or the issue?
It is a prototype of an HTML-preview. I cannot say when it was activated. But the tab is available already with BIRT 4.14

[colinsutton]

My issue was just that it is undocumented - is it useful? How? It seems to be a tab with a window that doesn't accept input.
I was busy when 4.14 was released, didn't see that one.

[speckyspooky]

Correct, the preview doesn't accept inputs and not all elements will be displayed according to the standard BIRT-viewer-HTML.
This prototype is a try to get faster the first impressions of the report results based on the internal eclipse browser.

I don't know which browser engine was used internally.
And from my point of view it is really an "early prototype" due to the missing options of the viewer.
And I'm with you that a small documentation would help to understand clearly the intention and also the next steps.
(I'm not the author of it.)

To decide whether it is useful, it is dependend on your use cases.
I work like before with the standard viewer-preview (HTML-preview).

[colinsutton]

..."not all elements will be displayed"...
I don't see anything displayed. I just noticed there is an error when I select that tab: "Unhandled event loop exception"
Unhandled event loop exception.txt.zip

[colinsutton]

Here's a sample design that shows the problem. It accesses a local time_zone.csv for its data source, then displays the first three columns from the dataset in view report html. On selecting the 'New Preview Prototype' the error occurs.
Archive.zip

[speckyspooky]

The problem is solved with the Ticket #1588.
There was a change coming during the eclipse-platform and I fixed that issue on BIRT side.
The nightly build shows currently more details on this tab.

But at the end it is a prototype and I don't know who developer will support it.
It is hard to have 2 previews - in my opinion it makes no sense. Therefore I ignore the "prototype tab"

[colinsutton]

The nightly build 2024-03-14 at 08:19 still shows "Unhandled event loop exception" when the tab is selected.

[colinsutton]

It is a different error, not solved by that ticket:
java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Control.setMenu(org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Menu)" because the return value of "org.eclipse.ui.forms.editor.IFormPage.getPartControl()" is null

[hvbtup]

Therefore I ignore the "prototype tab"

Me too. I am usually not interested in HTML output. Most of the time I use "Run report as PDF".
And sometimes "... as HTML", because during development I like the fact that the error messages are rendered in red at the bottom of the report, including stack trace. This is more useful than the "Problems" register, where it's hard to get at the details.

[speckyspooky]

The problem is documented also at #1589.
Currently there are problems with the "XML Source"-tab and the "HTML Prototype"-tab has problems
which are coming through the new eclipse-platform 2024-03.

The core components which cause the issue are not part of the BIRT project so it is very hard to figure out what we can do.
In the most cases we have no option to fix it directly.

[speckyspooky]

The issue is solved by #1603

[speckyspooky]

Please use the standard BIRT-HTML-preview. The prototype doesn't support currently all features.
It is really a kind of prototype and therefore you get in some cases errors.
In my cases not all features of images will be supported which are available at BIRT-HTML-preview.

If you have time then you are welcome as new contributor and to finalize the prototype.