Want to monitor your progress while rendering a BIRT report at a finer level then just page level and actually know how many elements you've done and how many are left?

First, record all the line numbers of every element in your report

            final TreeSet lineNos = new TreeSet();
            for (DesignElement de : rpd.getAllElements())
                lineNos.add(rpd.getLineNo(de));


Then you add a progress monitor to your task in the usual way, and at the start of each query you get the line number of the element being processed.