Document templates are self-contained archive files with the extension .dta (Document Template Archive). Rational® Publishing Engine templates are slightly different from templates that might be provided with other products. With other products, templates are example artifacts that are pre-populated with information for you to learn from and customize. In Rational Publishing Engine, templates are the base files for structuring your report output. Templates might have pre-populated information in them, if you start with someone else's template file as a base, but a new template is blank.
Document templates that are created with previous versions of IBM® Rational Publishing Engine work with the latest version. However, if your data provider does not support the latest version of the Rational Publishing Engine template structure, you can set the template version to use the template structure from previous versions of Rational Publishing Engine.
You can add both static and dynamic content to a document template. The static content includes the text and images that are provided when the template is designed. The dynamic content is represented by data that is obtained from the data sources when the document is generated. The template also defines formatting information, though some data might retain the formatting information that is embedded in it from the data source.
When a data source does not exactly match the data source schema, Rational Publishing Engine processes the elements that match the schema and ignores the noncritical errors. For example, if a Rational DOORS® attribute status is used in the template, and the actual data source (a Rational DOORS module) does not have this attribute, the document generation continues by default.
Rational Publishing Engine provides the mechanisms for creating or obtaining schemas for several data source types such as IBM Rational DOORS, IBM Rational Tau, and Rational REST data sources. For more information about the standard schema definition, see http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema. You can use a third-party application to produce a schema from XML data.
When you import templates, you can dynamically reference them or physically embed them. When you dynamically reference a template or an included file, depending on the output type you generate the template into, you are adding a link to that template or file or loading the contents of the imported template when you generate the output. When you physically embed a template or file, you are importing its contents into your master template immediately rather than at run time.
If there are any conflicts between the master template and the template you are referencing or embedding, you are prompted to resolve the conflicts. For example, conflicts might include different data source schemas. When the data source schemas are different, the schema from the imported template can be added to the master template to resolve the conflict.