Decision makers can use Rational® Focal Point™ to
capture and prioritize business needs from customers, stakeholders,
and market research in order to decide which needs might add the most
value to the business.
Tip: Rational Publishing Engine comes
with a set of sample reports. Before you begin to publish documents,
you can explore this example document generation scenario. See
Explore the sample REST template.
- Get familiar with the Rational Focal Point REST
service and the various URLs needed in order to extract data from Rational Focal Point using Rational Publishing Engine.
For more information about Rational Focal Point REST
service, see the Rational Focal Point information
center.
- Connect to a data source schema. See Adding data source schema.
- The schema can be on the local file system. For example, http://server:port/fp/resources is
a schema file that uses resources argument. You can
use this schema to add specific data pieces from your Rational Focal Point project.
- Or, any URI that is accessible from the computer. You can construct
a URL that points to the data source schema, open your data source
schema and from the xml file take the URI for a particular resource.
Add “?metadata=schema” at the end of the URI. A typical URI is structured
like this: http://server:port/fp/resources?metadata=schema.
You can use the elements in the data source schema to add queries
in your template. These queries specify what pieces of information
are ultimately generated in the report.
Note: Rational Focal Point schemas
are specific to each installation of the application. This means that
a template created for one Rational Focal Point server
cannot be reused on a different Rational Focal Point server.
- Once you have connected to the data source schema, you can design
your template using document studio. See Designing documents.
You can import an existing template containing a Master Page, a Heading,
and a section.
- Plan the structure of your document and define the content to
extract data. See Template development process to
get an overview of the template development process. For very large
documents you can create separate templates for each document block.
- Rational Publishing Engine has
a comprehensive set of template elements that you can use to structure
your document. You need to simply drag and drop template elements
into the editor area. See Structuring the template for
more details.
- You can use the Data Source Configuration element to define some
properties that are not known at runtime. See Adding dynamic data elements in the template. For example you could add a Rational Focal Point project
and generate the report.
- You can use filters, which are more specific versions of the general
data source URI, to point to specific subsets of data so that Rational Publishing Engine
does not attempt to retrieve more information than necessary from
the data source during report generation. These filters must be broad
enough to retrieve all necessary data referenced by the template or
the generated report will be incomplete. See Extracting data using native filters.
- Once you've finished creating the report template and populating
it with Rational Focal Point data
points, you can generate a report in a variety of formats. When you
generate a report, you must connect to the data source that contains
the information on which you want to run the report. You do this by
specifying a URI that points to the Rational Focal Point repository
that contains the relevant data.
- The typical data source URI for Rational Focal Point can
be determined by taking the data source schema URL, which was used
to add the schema to the template, and dropping the “?metadata=schema”
suffix. For example, if the data source schema URL used in the template
is this, http://{server}:{port}/fp/resources/?metadata=schema,
then the corresponding data source URI is http://{server}:{port}/fp/resources.
- If the data that you plan to access is contained within a smaller
portion of the schema, you can construct more specific URIs. For example, http://server:port-number/fp/resources/workspaces/4/modules/1/elements/?metadata=schema will
return the id field of all criteria resource elements and http://server:port-number/fp/resources/workspaces/4/modules/1/elements/ will
return the id and the summary fields of all Project resource elements.
See Assigning values in document specification file.
- Before you publish your document, see this topic Set
the output format to understand the available output options
that you can choose from.