BIRT Report Engine classes generate a formatted report from either a report design or a binary report document. Typically, these files have the extensions RPTDESIGN and RPTDOCUMENT respectively. The engine can also generate a binary report document from a report design.

To open a report design, call one of the openReportDesign( ) methods on ReportEngine. These methods instantiate an IReportRunnable object, using a String that specifies the path to a report design or an input stream. To open a report document, call ReportEngine.openReportDocument( ). This method instantiates an IReportDocument object, using a String that specifies the path to a report document. Handle the EngineException that these methods throw.