Maximo Eclipse BIRT Preview: Enable Debug Logging

If you’ve ever tried previewing a BIRT report in Eclipse while working with an IBM Maximo report and hit a mysterious error – you’re not alone. This issue is surprisingly common and can be frustrating enough to abandon the preview feature altogether. Many developers end up resorting to the tedious and time-consuming cycle of importing and exporting reports into Maximo repeatedly, hoping each tweak will get it right. 

Fortunately, there’s a better solution. Let's walk through one example. 

The below text shows our initial error message from the BIRT preview web page:

From these lines, it appears there is an issue with Eclipse handling scripts. To investigate further, we added a logging line in the ‘initialize’ script of the report: 

After re-running the report, we can now see more details from the error logs:

At first glance, you can see that the method ‘getString(ponum)’ has failed. The error log after that line shows that there is an issue with the following class file: 

We can then take a look at the class file from within our BIRT configurations. Then, by looking at the line number specified in the error log line, we can see that BIRT tries to retrieve a system property called mxe.report.birt.removeEmoji:

However, the value of 0 in the system property is not resolving as desired. 

One way to fix this is to hard-code the system property value from within the report to be false. Another way would be to query the Maximo database for this property and set it accordingly. In this example, we are taking the hard-coding approach. Now, the initialize script looks like this:

Now, the report preview will run. 

Thanks for reading! If you are interested in discussing or need support for BIRT reporting for your Maximo instance, feel free to reach out to us at info@nxterainc.com.