Designing templates with Rational Requirements Composer 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 the Rational Requirements Composer REST service and the various URLs needed in order to extract data from Rational Requirements Composer when you are using Rational Publishing Engine. To locate the information center for your version of Rational Requirements Composer, see About the Rational Requirements Composer 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. Identify a data source schema from your data source. To add specific data pieces from your Rational Requirements Composer project, enter the URL in this format:
    • https://server:port/rm/publish/artifact
    Example:
    • https://server:port/rm/publish/resources
  4. Add a data source schema to your document template. For Rational Requirements Composer, you can complete the following steps:
    1. In Document Studio, click Data > Add Data Source Schema.
    2. In Schema type, select the type of the schema from the list. For Rational Requirements Composer, select Generic XML.
    3. In Schema file field, paste in the URL you identified as the data source schema.
    4. Append ?metadata=schema to the end of the URL.
      • Example: https://server:port/rm/publish/artifact?metadata=schema
    5. In the Data Source ID field, type a name for the data source in the template. Click Next.
    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. Select the Authentication Type from the list. For Rational Requirements Composer, the authentication type is OAuth. If you do not select OAuth, each authentication type is tested until the correct type is found, which might increase document generation time.
  5. 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.
  6. Use queries, attributes, and variables to add data to a template. These items specify which pieces of information are generated in the report.
  7. Add formatting and styling to the elements to control how they display in the output.
  8. 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.
  9. Create sorts to organize the data in your report.

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