Use Rational® Focal Point™ to
capture and prioritize business needs from customers, stakeholders,
and market research to decide which needs might add the most value
to the business.
Tip: The
Rational Publishing Engine installation
includes a set of sample reports. Before you begin to publish documents,
you can explore this example document generation scenario. See
Creating a template with the REST sample data.
Before you begin
- Get familiar with the Rational Focal Point REST
service and the various URLs needed to extract data from Rational Focal Point when
you are using Rational Publishing Engine.
To locate the information center for your version of Rational Focal Point,
see About the Rational Focal Point information
centers.
- Connect to a data source schema. See Adding data source schema.
- After you connect to the data source schema, you can 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 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 elements into the template
content editor. See Template elements for more details.
- After you connect to the data source schema, you can plan the
structure of your document and define the content to extract data.
See Designing templates with Document Studio.
You can import an existing template containing a Master Page, a Heading,
and a section.
- 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 of necessary data referenced by the template
or it cannot include a complete set of data. See Extracting
data using native filters.
- After you create the report template and populate it with Rational Focal Point data
points, you can generate a report in various formats. When you generate
a report, you must connect to the data source that contains the information
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 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/fp/resources/workspaces/4/modules/1/elements/?metadata=schema returns
the id field of all criteria resource elements and http://server:port/fp/resources/workspaces/4/modules/1/elements/ returns
the id and the summary fields of
all Project resource elements.
See Creating a document specification.
- If data source schemas are added to a template after
the template is assigned to a document specification, the document
specification becomes out of sync. You can manually
synchronize the document specification or select a preference
option to automatically synchronize the document specification with
the current template. See Setting the Document Studio preferences for information about how to set
the Keep Document Specification synchronized with the current
Template? preference.
- Before you publish your document, see the Specifying output properties topic
for more information about the available output options that you can
choose from and which one is best to use for the elements you are
using in your template.
- Before you publish your document, see this topic Set
the output format to understand the available output options
that you can choose from.
- You are now ready to publish your document. See Publish
your document.