You can define IBM® Rational® System Architect as
a data source in IBM Rational Publishing Engine.
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 the REST sample template.
Before you begin
- Get familiar with the Rational System Architect REST
service and the various URLs needed to extract data from Rational System Architect using Rational Publishing Engine.
To locate the information center for your version of Rational System Architect,
see About the Rational System Architect information
center.
- Connect to a data source schema. See Adding a data source schema.
- Schema can be on the local file system. For example, https://server:port/rsasuite/com.ibm.rsa.business.enterprise.xsd is
a schema file that uses the enterprise argument.
You can use this schema to add specific data pieces from your Rational System Architect project.
- You can use the elements in the data source schema to add queries
in your template. These queries specify which pieces of information
are generated in the report.
- After you connect to the data source schema, you can create or
import a template design. With Rational Publishing Engine Document
Studio, you can build a report template design. This design determines
the layout of the report. See Authoring templates with Document Studio.
- 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.
- Rational Publishing Engine has
a comprehensive set of template elements that you can use to structure
your document. You can drag elements into the template content editor.
See Template elements in the Palette view for more details.
- Use queries, attributes and variables to
add data to the template.
- 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 can use this schema
and dynamically configure it for specific pieces of data in your template
from your Rational System Architect project. https://server:port/rsasuite/com.ibm.rsa.business.enterprise.xsd.
- 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 Rational System Architect repository
during report generation. These filters must be broad enough to retrieve
all necessary data referenced by the template or the generated report
cannot include a complete set of data. See Extracting
data using native filters.
- After you create the report template and populate it with Rational System Architect data
points, you can generate a report in various formats. When you generate
a report, you must connect to the data source by specifying a URI
that points to the Rational System Architect repository
that contains the relevant data. See Connecting to a data source.
- 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.