When you integrate Rational® Publishing Engine with Rational DOORS®,
you can generate documents directly from within Rational DOORS.
Before you begin
Examine the
Rational DOORS module
that you intend to use and its contents. To locate the information
center for your version of
Rational DOORS,
see
About the Rational DOORS information
center. Tip: You can use the combination of module
properties, object attributes, and views that are stored in the modules.
Review the available views in a module for computed columns including
traceability views, or perhaps Layout DXL columns. These views do
not correspond to Rational DOORS attributes,
but might be something that you would like to include in the report.
Installation
Install
Rational DOORS before
installing
Rational Publishing Engine.
Rational Publishing Engine must
modify the registry key created by
Rational DOORS.
Note: The
Rational Publishing Engine installation
on Windows updates several
registry entries for
Rational DOORS.
If
Rational DOORS is
installed after
Rational Publishing Engine,
open
IBM® Installation Manager and
click
Modify and complete the wizard for
Rational Publishing Engine to
reset the configuration for
Rational DOORS.
This updates the latest registry changes made by the
Rational Publishing Engine installer.
To update the registries manually, see
Manually updating the Rational DOORS registries.
During
the Rational Publishing Engine installation,
you have the option of installs the Rational DOORS add-in.
When the add-in is installed, you can publish Rational Publishing Engine templates
directly from Rational DOORS.
If Rational Publishing Engine is
installed before Rational DOORS,
the registry key is not updated and the Publish plug-in contained
in the Rational DOORS add-in
cannot be found by Rational DOORS.
Building your template
- Use the Rational DOORS schema
discovery wizard to generate a new schema. When you discover the schema
of the Rational DOORS module,
you can decide which attributes and columns to make available for
use in the template. You can select those items and place them in
the template. See Adding a Rational DOORS data source schema with the schema discovery wizard.
You can also elevate the attributes later while designing the template.
Attributes add declarative information to elements beyond the usual
predefined keywords.
User-defined Rational DOORS attributes
are only accessible through the Attribute nodes in
the standard Rational DOORS schema
file. To use these attributes, the attribute values can be elevated as
XML-attributes using the XML schema discovery wizard. An attribute
might have a single occurrence, for example, Module Name,
and the Last Modified On property. Attributes might
apply to an object, but have multiple occurrences, such as the Object
Heading and Object Text. You can also discover
which object attributes are present in the Rational DOORS Module,
and then assess whether they must appear in your Rational Publishing Engine report.
Use menu selection to access the list of attributes included
in the module.
- Use queries, attributes and variables to
add data to a template.
- Design your template using Document Studio. See Authoring templates with Document Studio.
After you are connected to the data source schema, you can plan the
structure of your document and define the content to extract data.
See Designing document templates to
get an overview of the template development process. For large documents,
you can create separate templates for each document block.
- Construct a common container element to hold several paragraphs.
Each paragraph is controlled by a test condition that associates it
only with specific data from the source Rational DOORS module.
Formatting controls and style specifications are used to create the
output. See Adding elements to a template.
You can use container elements instead of tables for Rational DOORS Analyst
diagrams that are contained in a 1x1 table.
- Create a table from Rational DOORS data.
See Adding a table element. There is no direct support for
reproducing a Rational DOORS table
exactly as it looks like in Rational DOORS;
you can use available Rational DOORS table
attributes and generate a new table.
- You can use the Data Source Configuration element
to define some properties that are not known at run time. See Adding a data source configuration element. For example, you could add a Rational DOORS project
that is not yet created and generate a test report for future use.
- You can use filters, which are detailed 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 cannot include complete data. See Extracting
data using native filters to learn more on how to use Rational Publishing Engine filters
native.
Publishing the document
- After you finished creating the report template and populating
it with Rational DOORS data
points, you can generate a report in various formats. When you generate
a report, you must be connected to the data source that contains the
information to include in the report. To point to the relevant data,
see Connecting to the Rational DOORS data source.
Tip: You can extract Object Linking and Embedding (OLEs) from
a
Rational DOORS data
source. See
OLE objects.
- 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 design 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.
- You are now ready to publish your document. See Generating a document.
- If you have the Rational DOORS add-in
installed, you can publish directly from the Rational DOORS user
interface.
- When you click Publish from the Database
view, you are prompted for template and document specification configurations
as you would by clicking in Rational Publishing Engine.
- When you click Publish from the Module
view, you can select a new document specification and add templates
to it, or you can select an existing document specification that already
has templates added to it. Then, if the template uses a Rational DOORS data
source, Rational Publishing Engine configures
the data source for you with the information from the open Module
to generate the document. If any of the existing configuration information
in the document specification does not match the information in the
open Module, the existing information is overwritten with the information
from the open Module.
Note: In Rational Publishing Engine 1.1.2.2,
a user could select a template to publish, and a document specification
would be generated automatically. In Rational Publishing Engine 1.2
and later, users must create document specifications before publishing
because document specifications are no longer generated automatically.
Important: For local document generation, Rational Publishing Engine can
connect to a running Rational DOORS client,
however, for remote document generation, that option is not available.
If you are publishing using the remote generation engine from either
the Database or the Module view, you must enter authentication credentials
in the document specification before generating your document so that
the remote Rational Publishing Engine service
can instantiate a new Rational DOORS headless
client to pull the report data.