Designing templates with Rational RequisitePro as a data source

Report designers can use Document Studio to import data source schemas and build report templates.

Before you begin

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.
Get familiar with Rational RequisitePro® requirements to extract data using Rational Publishing Engine. To locate the information center for your version of Rational RequisitePro, see About the Rational RequisitePro information center.

About this task

Data is extracted by using the REST API. This interface is installed and implemented with the data source application and works independently of Rational Publishing Engine. For more information about the REST API for a data source, see the documentation for that data source.

Procedure

  1. Review Designing document templates for an overview of the template development process. Start planning the structure of your document and the data that might be included. For example, decide whether the final document will be generated from one template or from multiple template files that each contain reusable pieces of content.
  2. In the Document Studio application, create a document template.
  3. Add a data source schema to your document template. For Rational RequisitePro, you can discover the data source schema by entering the base URL to the application.
    1. In Document Studio, click Data > Schema Discovery > REST Schema Discovery.
    2. Enter a Name for the data source.
    3. Enter a Description for the data source.
    4. Specify the Base URL for the resource.
    5. Select the Authentication Type from the list. For the Rational RequisitePro adapter provided by Data Services, you must specify Basic authentication. If you do not select a type, each type is tested until the correct type is found, which might increase document generation time.
    6. If the resource is in a secured server, specify the User name.
    7. If the resource is in a secured server, specify the Password.
    8. Click Next. The base URL you entered is automatically appended with ?metadata=schema.
    9. Click Finish. The data source schema you selected displays in the Data Source Schema view.
  4. Add elements to the template. 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. For example, you can add a Container element to hold several paragraphs. Each paragraph might be controlled by a test condition that associates it only with specific data. For more information, see Template elements in the Palette view and Adding elements to a template.
  5. Use queries, attributes, and variables to add data to a template. These items specify which pieces of information are generated in the report.
  6. Add formatting and styling to the elements to control how they display in the output.
  7. Create filters to narrow the data that is pulled into the report. 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. In Reportable Rest v1 native filters, you are only required to enter the text between the brackets []. The rest of the filter is generated by Rational Publishing Engine. The following Reportable Rest v1 native filter example extracts the Rational RequisitePro PRRequirements schema by using Stability='High'.
    Add a filter expression to the node under Appliances, so only the appliances manufactured by a specific manufacturer are selected.
    fields=Project/Requirements/PRRequirement[Stability = 'High']/(Stability|FullTag|Priority|Status)
  8. Create sorts to organize the data in your report. Rational RequisitePro does not support the use of native sorts. Instead, you can create a sort in Rational RequisitePro:
    1. Create a table and enter data.
    2. Sort the data.
    3. Create a view and save the data to it.
    4. Export the view to use as a data source schema in Rational Publishing Engine. The Reporting data services application automatically detects the view.
    5. Add the data source schema to your Rational Publishing Engine template.
    The Rational RequisitePro data that is generated in the Rational Publishing Engine output retains the sorting from the view, however, some nested data might not display as nested.

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