Develop Reference

Birt page headers and footers

Is it possible to add headers and footers to a birt report programmaticly? I need to add page numbers, page count, page n of m, date, and file name and things like this. I know how to do this in the eclipse report designer, but I need to do this in java. Is this possible?

This is entirely possible using Java. Although this is a much more overall tutorial, please take a look at the link below. Also note that you can find more references online for how to create BIRT tutorials using Java.
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Java_-_Build_Dynamic_Table_(BIRT)

How to render plain html in Play 2.0

I'm working on learning JSP and the Play framework, and I understand that it runs on Scala and renders views based on templates, but what if I just want to use plain HTML rather than scala templates?
The situation I'm in is that I'm designing the site to match a visual template, so I'm using Dreamweaver to build the html files. I really like Play framework though, so I'd like to continue using it. So, what are my options here?

I don't get. Play's views are not just nice html files, of course you can (or even should) use your favorite tools for design part, anyway you have to also learn how to include a dynamic parts in it.
Of course you can use DreamWeaver for that task as it has feature for editing source code. But I can ensure you from my own experience, that there are better tools for every-day work with Play's views than DW.
You can also use plain HTML in your /public folder however in this scenario you won't be able to make it dynamic, so it has no sense, as you can create the pages without any framework - just using static files created with DW.
In general words: you need to verify your needs, cause from your question I read: "I like Play framework, anyway I don't want to use it for its job..."
After-comments edit:
You don't have to make views dynamic. If you won't pass any arguments into the view and will put there pure HTML it will be 'relatively cheap' way for displaying static pages as well. Just you need to remeber to leave first line of the file empty. So you don't need to use File index = new File... instead just put your bare HTML code into ie: app/views/staticContact.scala.html and then use an action:
public static Result staticContact(){
return ok(views.html.staticContact.render());
}
On the quite other hand, last time I was wondering if it wasn't better to put HTML code of the static pages into the DB, in such case you could create an editing page, where you could change HTML without redeploying the application. All what you will need it was just fetching HTML from DB and displaying it in one generic view. For better performance you can use included Cache implementation.

GET / controllers.Assets.at(path="/public/html", file="index.html")
This is working for play 2.0.1 for /public/html/index.html file

Alternative to subreports in JasperReports

I am using JasperReports in my project. During the generation of reports, I am forced to retrieve data from different tables in the database. I have used subreports, but this solution is not satisfactory for me. Main reason for this is fact that for each report I have to prepare two jrxml files. For the assumptions of my project this is not effective.
Is there an alternative to subreports? If it is important I use Hibernate.

Mateusz, you can prepare data source manually in java code and pass is to the report.
Sometimes the good subreport's alternative is using group(s) in report.

At a higher level what are you trying to achieve ?
If the reason you're using subreports is to embed mulitple graphs/chart widgets that display different but related data, then an alternative way to doing this is using subdatasets
Innformation on using subdatasets can be found in iReport Ultimate Guide, but basically they are extra sub queries you can run in addition to the main report query, whose results can be access by Charts/Charts Pro widgets (see the chart data tab in these widget properties)

Is there a way to change or reskin an incoming website on the fly?

I have a project where they want me to embed a website into a java application and they want the website to have a similar color scheme as the rest of the application. I know a lot about CSS and building websites but I am not aware of a way to change the look of a website as it comes in on the fly. Is there someone who can help?
Update:
I don't have access to the header because it is not my website. To give more info about the project is we have a browser embedded in a java client application. The user needs to access a website that displays the contents of a database. I have no access to the original html or css from the site.
What i need is to change the background color and font sizes of the incoming webpage to match the look and feel of the java application.

One approach would be to replace their CSS with your own.
You could also take the approach used by the Stylish plugin, which involves a lot !important decelerations to override the site's CSS. Since this is a Java app, I assume the user will not have opportunity to supply their own CSS, so using !important here doesn't precisely go against the standard.

In your particular situation, I'd look into data scraping, all you need to do is scrape the website for the data, and then re-style it to present it how you want.
Good luck

The Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox does just this. You can write a bit of Javascript code and have it run when certain web pages load. One common thing to use it for is to make changes to the DOM to move page elements around, hide or resize elements, change colors, etc. There are a bunch of examples at userscripts.org if you want to get an idea of what I am talking about.
Your code would simply need to do something similar. Load the page (including the normal style sheets) and then use the DOM to make changes to style elements as desired. Browse through the source of the page to get the names/ids of important elements, and your code can key off of those. Loading an additional CSS file containing your changes is an option, but doing it programmatically will likely give you more flexibility in the event that the target website changes.

Depends on what do you use to show the pages in Java. Most browser implementations support dynamic changes to the DOM, so you can simply add a CSS file to header as a last element, and it will be applied.

you need to know the markup of the html / css so you can make the best skin.
you could theoretically do it by styling just the basic tags: h1...h6, p, etc... but it would not be as good and would probably fail to produce the best results at times and even produce horrible things at times.
if you KNOW the site markup then you can make a skin and simply use CSS/images to skin it as you wanted it.
just include your CSS markup LAST so that it overrides the one already present on the site that you want to skin differently.
should not be a difficult thing per se. the skin itself is probably the better (more effort required) part of the job.

On the fly, should mean changing the html fetched. So parsing and replacing tokens seems to be a/the way.
You could change the locations of the style sheet files by replacing the href value in a link that points to a css file, and set the value to your style sheet (a different URI).
<link type="text/css" href="mylocalURI" rel="stylesheet />
(this should be the result of a process/replacement)
I think you understand what should happend for inline styles.

I would use JTidy to normalize the original site HTML to XHTML, then use XSLT to filter only the interesting/relevant information, obtaining XML format; and finally (since I wouln't want to convert XML to objects), XSLT again to transform the "pure" XML into the HTML look & feel I need/want.
All of this can be assembled as streams, using more or less 4 Kb of buffer per filter (12 Kb total) per thread. Also meaning that it will run fast enough. And all built on standard, open-source available components.
Cheers.

Drag and Drop an Email from MS Outlook to Eclipse RCP

Has anyone got a working solution without some Java/COM-bridge? E.g. process the Email as a file (.msg) rather than locating the data that is referenced in the Clipboard?

Maybe this is a solution for your problem:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaoutlookdd/
It allows to handle outlook items like File objects during drag&drop.

I did make some headway on this sort of thing a few years back using Apache POI to extract the contents of an email from .msg files. I'm pretty sure they have a simple swing explorer / viewer that you can use to examine the structure within the compound document format, but I can't find it right now.
I was able to extract most information that I was interested in but was ultimately wanting to create a mime format version of the message and couldn't extract all the information I needed in a format I could use.

I assume that you've already ruled out the tools in "org.eclipse.swt.dnd" for some reason? There are some examples here on how to go about using them, in case you haven't. If what you really want to do is drag&drop, you're going to have to do some work with those tools. At that point, really the question becomes, what format is it in on the clipboard, vs in a file, and which is easier to integrate into your app.