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Topic Title: Document Generation from DOORS Topic Summary: I would like to know which solutions to generate documents are used by the DOORS users community Created On: 12-Sep-2007 13:21 Status: Post and Reply |
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Dear all,
what is everybody using for document generation (I mean Word or PDF) from DOORS? I have been trying to use DocExpress, but I suspect that at least some DOORS users have preferred to write their own DXL code for this purpose. And frankly speaking DocExpress does seem to be a bit cumbersome to use. Any opinion on this? Any lessons learnt? Any other possibility other than the two mentioned above? |
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Michele,
Ask your Telelogic representative for WEXP. Telelogic does not actively support it, but I found it to be much easier to use than DocExpress. That does not mean that it is easy to use (configuration requires a lot of time and testing), but once you have it working, it does its job wonderfully. ------------------------- Kevin Murphy http://www.baselinesinc.com The Requirements Management Experts |
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I'll second that. My experience of DocExpress is it does far more than we would ever need and it takes far far far longer to export than WEXP.
WEXP does everything that you could wish for. ------------------------- - Martin |
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Hi Martin and Kevin
thanks very much for your replies. The fact that WEXP does not even appear on the telelogic website though does not hint to a long to be supported product, but rather something to be phased out. Has anybody ever had to get support from Telelogic for that? Does anyone know how it actually generates the document, does it also (as DocExpress) recompose the document putting together thousands of little .dot files, one per each object? thanks |
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Telelogic does not give _any_ support with regard to WEXP, and no continuity is guaranteed. In theory, it should work as long as DXL is supported,
however, there was a thread on a bugfix / workaround required for WEXP to work with DOORS 8.x. So there is a risk. I do, however, agree with the previous posters, that is is great to use once you got everything set up correctly. Which brings me to your second question. The export is basically controlled via additional attributes in the DOORS module and style templates in a Word template file. So you need one .dot file in which you define how e.g. a requirement should be built from e.g. the attributes "Req. ID", "Object Text" and "Verification method". The key point is that you mark this style template with a bookmark in the word template file and use this bookmark name in an object attribute. During the export, if WEXP comes to an object which is to be exported into this style template, it copies the style template (using the bookmark) at the current position in the exported word file and fills the attribute place holders with the actual values. That's it. One should note that you do not have to use the style templates, "simple" paragraphs can just be exported as they are, and can use the "Paragraph Style" attribute. For simple text, this is much faster than using the style templates. Regards, Peter |
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If DocExpress is much slower than WEXP it is slow indeed. The trouble with WEXP is that it exports the objects to Word one at a time and uses the clipboard. If speed was important to the writer he would have exported all the information to an rtf file and used extra columns or files to specify the processing options. Word tables are also slow and badly designed, but doing it this way is an order of magnitude quicker than anobject at a time and there are tricks you can use to speed it up.
The DOORS database appears to be a variant of xml (have a look at some of the treedata files). A really powerful idea, now that we have Word 2003 that supports XML would be to transform the DOORS XML into Word XML and use the processing options within the transform to make the output look the way you want - you would theoretically get a lightning fast export. Thats what you would think DocExpress would try and do - haven't tried the latest versions may be it does now. The trouble with DocExpress is that it tries to do huge numbers of things that almost no one wants and is therefore bloated and apparently hugely slow. Disappointing. ------------------------- Regards, Richard Good |
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Richard,
It's not only bloated and slow, but it isn't the most straightforward thing to learn either. I've always had an aptitude for learning software quickly. DocExpress just was not intuitive. To be fair, I have not used the latest version and I've heard that Telelogic has implemented a lot of WEXP-like features into DocEx, but because I already knew MS Word, all I had to do was read the WEXP User Guide and start expirementing. I know Telelogic is against segmenting their product line, but WEXP is really, really good. If anyone at Telelogic is reading this, it really should either be bundled with DOORS or be sold as an add-on. Maybe that'd be bad for marketing, but I'd convince my companies to pay for it. (Just don't bundle it with DocEx!) I've only used WEXP on DOORS 7.1, and its batch scheduler just flat-out didn't work. Having a supported version of WEXP would be wonderful. ------------------------- Kevin Murphy http://www.baselinesinc.com The Requirements Management Experts |
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Hi Michele,
My advice is to take care and avoid the trap where the printing activity can become an irrationally emotive and time consuming part of the req management process - I kind of like the way in which one project I'm working on has paired back the printing process to get rid of the gold plating that was taking place. The following won't suit everyone, but it's an alternative to consider. They split their documents to be produced from DOORS into two parts, the front bit and the back bit! The back bit is just the table of contents and the body of the spec. The DOORS built in "Page Set-up" and "Print" functions are used to produce the back bit in PDF (the "Page Set-up" - "Table" layout option is used) - there's nothing wrong with this print job, it's quite readible, it handles DOORS tables if your using them, and what's more, it's lightening quick to produce compared to DocExpress and WEXP. You can take advantage of PDF features to include corporate logo's or additional header\footer boiler text if needed. You can also use a larger page size to fit more in and then use PDF to zoom this down to a smaller default print page size. The front bit is done using MSWord, this has the front cover page with all of the usual corporate logo stuff, sign-off boxes etc etc, it also includes a change details table to outline the changes for each successive release. This is converted to PDF and added to the back bit to end up with a complete document. The front bit is re-used for each successive release so it doesn't have to be fully regenerated every time. The turn around time for this is much quicker than exporting to MSWord and then doing all of the post export sanity checks and fine tune format fixes. I'd love to attach a PDF sample to demonstrate what the hell I'm on about here but it seems that I can only attach text data for DXL code. However, if I had to vote between DocExpress and WEXP, my vote would go to WEXP - given the user demand for WEXP and given that it's been around since DOORS version 5, I don't quite understand why Telelogic has never incorporated WEXP functionality into the base DOORS product. ------------------------- Paul Miller Specification Practices Specialist, EuroCyber, Melbourne, Australia. Mobile: +61 (0)418 135 103 Web Site: http://www.eurocyber.biz E-mail: miller@eurocyber.biz">pmiller@eurocyber.biz |
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Written my own, posted it here (ages ago), improved it a lot, and it's currently working for my users, but lacking a certain functionality. In adding the functionality, I broke the dialogue box (see this thread).
One of my users used to use WEXP at a previous company, and is happy with my solution as an alternative. It's not as flexible, because it's tailored to my company, but it works, and it's reasonably quick, and not that difficult to set up (I do most of it for the users in advance). When I fix the dialogue box, I'll post the new version here (these forums, not this post). Paul. ------------------------- Paul dot Tiplady at TRW dot com TRW Automotive |
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Paul Miller,
I'd love to see the PDF. Would you mind sending me a copy? kevin.murphy@baselinesinc.com ------------------------- Kevin Murphy http://www.baselinesinc.com The Requirements Management Experts |
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I would also love to see the PDF as we do not have doc Express or WEXP and use the print and export functionalities of DOORS instead.
thanks
Sarah
sarah.moore@trgc.com
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We just took the default word export script and turbocharged it. Basically slashed and burned until all the 'extras' were removed, then implemented a lot of speed enhancers (table export for instance can be greatly enhanced, see other thread in here somewhere). Also added visual basic to the template file to create frontpage, headers and footers TOC etc. Trigger the VBA from dxl as required. We now get a 1500+ page, table heavy, ready-to-send-to-customer document in about 10 minutes, but it hasn't been easy. I cant post the code direclty, but all the ingredients are in this forum under various threads with my name on them. The biggest battle I have fought is to convince users not to 'touch-up' the output word doc, but to report problems and fix text changes directly in DOORS, then re-export.
------------------------- Andrew Tagg Thales Air Systems, Melbourne Australia. andrew.tagg@thalesatm.com |
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We use WEXP plus we have our own coded exporters dependent on circumstance, but since feb we've added DocExpress to the mix too. To be quite frank the changes in DocExpress since version 4 are like a breath of fresh air, it's faster and more usable then it was, I would say it's worth playing with the demo.
------------------------- Graham Stradling, Alcatel-Lucent. |
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Just had a read of the DocExpress/ DOORS integration documentation for version 4 and it seems like a lot of though and effort have gone into the latest release. Just thought I'd add that as I wouldn't have been quite as disparaging about it earlier in this thread if I'd read the integration document before writing my comments. Anyway Telelogic seem to have enough confidence in it to discontinue support for WEXP so you would hope that it captures most of the functionality in WEXP, but I guess we'll have to wait for comments from current WEXP users to see if this is indeed the case.
------------------------- Regards, Richard Good |
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I create Adobe .PDF files and that seems to work well...better than exporting to MS program or printing directly from DOORS. I can also format headers and footers better using the Adobe.
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I developed a XML exporter using Word 2003 transformations. It requires you to develop a XML dxl script that transforms the module into a readable XML file and requires you to develop a XSLT file for every possible transformation you want.
Works lightning fast and if you build the functionality right, has more capability than WEXP. The only issue I found is a memory leak in the XML generation, since I stream the output to a .xml file. Works really fast in the beginning then slows as the stream file gets bigger. Not sure why. |
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We generate Word docs from DOORS modules. DocExpress (I did not try the latest version) is slow. I create a module view of the information to be exported and use the built-in DOORS function Export to MS Office - Word. I apply a VBA script to format the Word document the way I want it to be presented. Since the majority of the Word docs require a particular format, I customized the script as a macro and run it. I find it the fastest way of generating the Word docs.
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Has anyone played with exporting direct to the XML(ish) format that lies behind a word 2003 doc? I'm thinking it must be faster to export direct to a text file in the correct markup, then open that in word afterwards? Its on my 'things to do in my copious free time' list.
------------------------- Andrew Tagg Thales Air Systems, Melbourne Australia. andrew.tagg@thalesatm.com |
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I developed a XML exporter using Word 2003 transformations. It requires you to develop a XML dxl script that transforms the module into a readable XML file and requires you to develop a XSLT file for every possible transformation you want. Works lightning fast and if you build the functionality right, has more capability than WEXP. The only issue I found is a memory leak in the XML generation, since I stream the output to a .xml file. Works really fast in the beginning then slows as the stream file gets bigger. Not sure why. Matt, anything you'd like to share with us or is it a company secret? This could be just what we need. WEXP and DocExpress are just tooooooo slow and DocExpress is additionally just too damn complicated.... and I should pay an extra tool license just to be able to print my requirements in a 'professional' format?? |
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I use a pretty simple script that creates a new view in the module based on what we want exported, then saves the it out as PDF document. Quick, easy and gives the customer exactly what they want.
------------------------- Scott Boisvert Engineering Tools Administrator L-3 Communications - Avionics Systems scott.boisvert@l-3com.com |
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