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Topic Title: Paper document creation Topic Summary: Created On: 1-Apr-2003 23:19 Status: Post and Reply |
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I'm a very new user to DOORS and am just finding my way around, so I'm probably asking something stupid here.
There seems to be many ways to get documents from DOORS to paper, but none of them seem to easily result in a clean, readable document (in my opinion). As I see it, I can export to some format using DXL to create that export, then I could process that export (using Perl or something), then I can import to Word using templates and perhaps some VBA to tune the import. Or I can use the DOORS print function and find some way to tweak that formatting. From a high-level view, there ought to be some logical choices to be made. For example, is DXL easier than VBA at getting things done? Do you get the best raw material with an export from DOORS to HTML, RTF, or something else? Or is printing the best because you don't end up with additional documents to track, just the DOORS source. Being a new user, I don't know DXL (yet) and I've done some, but not much, VBA. This situation makes me pine for a minimal markup language (such as nroff) that I could whip into shape with Perl, then use a formatter to finish the fancy stuff (Word template). Shows my age, I guess. What I want to end up with is a neatly formatted document with headers and footers matching my company's standard (with logos). I have attributes and requirements tags that I want to include, but I don't want to include any blank tags and I don't want them taking up additional lines. I think I'd be happy with the basic requirements tag in square brackets at the end of the subject sentence (the end of the object text). Or perhaps as a hanging indent with a named style (requirement_tag)? But only if the tag is non-blank for that item. Pointers, please? |
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Printing has been an issue for some of the project teams that we support. One of the things that I'm looking at is using DXL to 'export' the module or view to XML. You can then use XSL and CSS to format the output exactly as you want, even with page breaks. There are some examples of exporting XML around here but it's actually pretty straight forward.
Cheers, C. |
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The html exporter is the easiest one to tweak. The file you are looking for is libhtml.dxl. DXL is reportedly a lot like perl, I am sure the rest of the users here will aggree or otherwise loudly with that.
------------------------- Hazel Woodcock |
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Jim,
Should you find some cleaver way to do this, I am sure that many would appreciate hearing about it...but for many of us, we have adopted an attitude of "All printed copies have been supersceded" and are not spending ANY time making pretty prints. I can only speak of myself, but the only time I print is for a hard copy backup of my modules (which is a third layer of redundancy for my work)... We are trying to get everybody to look directly at the database (often through the web interface) to get the current information... Good luck, Mark ------------------------- Mark Phillips mark.phillips@swri.org |
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The Word Exporter does a fair job. It doesn't too easily handle (if at all) outputting other attributes other than Object Text/headers. IIf you have a fixed set, it is easy to modify to output other attributes.
You can export to a company template to get the header/footers you desire. Make use of the Paragraph Style attribute that maps to the template allows you to control the style in Word. Telelogic has a tool, DocExpress that works in the Word environment that give greater flexibility to pull in data from DOORS (and other sources). Frank |
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Jim,
It may seem odd at first, but the need to output well formatted paper/electronic documents was the motivation to create the Enhanced Export to Excel utility. It takes the current view in a module, and outputs the objects as rows and DOORS columns as columns, with sizing, richtext formatting, color, OLE objects, and other formatting options (headers and footers from page setups). If logos in the header/footer is a requirement, you can export to an existing spreadsheet template. In both cases, you would likely want to export in landscape. I have some users that take the resulting Excel spreadsheet and use Adobe Acrobat to .pdf it, so the output is static for relase to suppliers and/or vendors. Give it a try, and let us know if it helps. ------------------------- Michael Sutherland michael@galactic-solutions.com http://galactic-solutions.com |
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We are also using the word.dxl exporter utility to send a DOORS module to a Word template but struggling with getting the paragraph styles to work the way we want on all the object text. I've got Paragraph Style for headings, e.g. <Object Heading:Heading 1> to come out in Word, but paragraph styles on object text, e.g. <Object Text:Italics> doesn't come through.
Once in Word, we select the text and then do Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-<spacebar> to reapply the styles in the document template. We also want to pick up other attributes from DOORS and incorporate them in our Word document, e.g. a requirement tag. I'm now contemplating trying to modify the word.dxl utility. I haven't tried the HTML or Enhanced Export to Excel, but may go there too. |
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We introduced DOORS part way through a project in which the documentation we needed to supply to our customer had to be in a particular format. So, when we started with DOORS, one of the first tasks was to find a way of exporting the main text of a module into a document formatted the way our customer expected. This involved extensive modifications to the standard DXL export-to-word script (making an already gargantuan piece of DXL even longer, though I did take the opportunity of splitting some of the functions into separate files to make it a little more manageable). The exporter relies upon specific named bookmarks existing in the WORD template (which was also extensively modified), so that document information such as issue status, headers and footers, and authors, could be included in the appropriate fields of the front page. The standard front-page template also includes, in large italics, a statement to the effect that the document is an uncontrolled copy of source material that resides in the DOORS database. We're fairly pleased with the results. I do have the uncomfortable feeling that the process is a bit shaky (having spent many hours experimenting with different ways of poking Word from DXL in an attempt to get it do do what I wanted), though in practice it has proved remarkably reliable.
There's a good chance that our customers will be getting DOORS soon, so the need to export documents into word is likely to recede. |
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We have been struggling with this issue as well. We are using DOORS as a requirements database with numerous attributes per module/object, but people still want to see the information presented in the traditional standard company design document template in Word. We spend a number of weeks attempting to export data into the template using DXL and RTF templates based on our company standard. Needless to say this was less than a complete success and looked like it would be a maintenance nightmare.
Telelogic has some other products that seem to be made just to make up for this lack of support within DOORS itself - DocExpress/Word and DocExpress/Factory. We have been evaluating DocExpress/Word for a few weeks now and it appears to do the job fairly well .. if a little slow. Basically, DocExpress allows you to create an 'authoring' document based on your company template and styles. You create custom .dot files for the form and content you want to extract from a DOORs module(s). Then from DocExpress, you open your company template and using the DocExpress menus, insert text form fields that are linked your DOORS source modules. Following the menus, you can select the source module, the baseline version, the View, and a filter (DXL file that selects a .dot template based on the data being extracted. Once you have inserted the form fields, the data appears in your authoring document in the form you defined in the .dot files. Once you have created the authoring document, you can have it update the information content whenever you want. You can also save the authoring document as a standalone Word document (text is inserted and links are removed) via the menus. We have just now started evaluating DocExpress/Factory which allows you to create a template authoring document and use it to generate reports based on different source modules, baseline versions, views, etc. Don't know if this will help, but this seems to be a better, more maintainable approach than writing a bunch of custom DXL and RTF templates. Good Luck!! |
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