Btukfyl

is there any way we can update the values in BIRT report which in-turn will update the database ? We need to present a report generated in Microsoft SQL server to the client , we tried providing the report in excel however our client changes the format and it is difficult to again consume it in our proprietary tool
(which is Microsoft SQL based). Is there any way we can achieve this? Client should update the values in the report and it should get reflected in the DB

while it's possible to write to wrtie back to db from BIRT using a servlet (see Eclipse Community Forum) I don't know of a way how BIRT could track the changed values.

While it's difficult to campare excel files it should be simpler to create csv files from these excel files and comparing the csv files independant of excel formating changes.

I see the gattering of value changes and writing back to the db as an independant separate workflow not related to the reporting.

Reporting tools are made for generating output only.
A general automatism concept is impossible, if you think about it from a more abstract point of view:

There's data D in the data base (usually spread accross several tables T1, ..., Tn, and records R1, ..., Rm).
The report output data O = (o1, o2, ...) is a the result of a more or less complex (the opposite of trivial) function f(R1, ..., Rm).
An automatic back-propagation automatism of any kind like you dream of would have to know what changing the value of o1 from "spam" to "eggs" means for R1, ..., Rm.
... Or even for records which were not selected by f, for example if the user changed the value of a primary key column.
This is only possible if the function f is bijective (I don't know if the english word is correct), but usually f isn't bijective. Even if it is, the task of inverting a non-trivial function is very hard.

Thus, if you want to let the user change values and persist the changes inside the DB, you need some kind of database UI or some kind of import interface.

Depending on your database, it might be as trivial as let the user work with Oracle SQL*developer or similar tools which support importing data from excel sheets.
However, these tools are intended for SQL developers, as the name implies.

OTOH, if all you want is to perform DML statements in BIRT, this is possible indirectly: You can write stored procedures in the database doing the DML work, and call these procedures from BIRT (use a JDBC Stored Procedure Query instead of JDBC SQL Select Query).