To make data objects available to report developers using BIRT Designer Professional, place the data objects in a shared resource folder, just as you do with other shared resources, such as libraries and style sheets.

To make data objects available to dashboard and Report Studio users, you must publish the data objects in an iHub volume. From the iHub perspective, a data object is a resource, similar to Java classes, image files, or libraries, which are resources for reports published in iHub.

You can publish data object design (.datadesign) files or data object stores (.data). A common strategy is to publish the design files, then schedule those files to be run regularly to generate the data object stores. To manage system resources effectively, iHub volume administrators can make the data object stores generally available to users while limiting access to the data object design files. The administrator grants specific users or user groups access to the data object. This type of security is implemented in iHub, and users either have access to all the items in the data object, or none at all.

Using BIRT Designer Professional in conjunction with iHub, you can apply more granular security rules to control user access to individual items in a data object, down to which data set columns, cube dimensions and measures, and data rows are available to particular groups of users, as described in Providing data security.