Documentation is often subject to complex style and formatting requirements. Creating documents and keeping them up-to-date is time consuming and error-prone. Documents can even become outdated by the time you have finished writing them. Rational Publishing Engine is designed for organizations that develop their system and software using tools from Rational or other vendors. It provides a comprehensive solution for various data sources such as IBM Rational DOORS®, IBM Rational Tau, and other Rational applications that expose their data through a REST interface.
Rational Publishing Engine provides the following components for generating documents:
With Rational Publishing Engine, you spend less time creating documents and keeping them up to date.
Data sources can be Rational DOORS, Rational Tau, generic XML data sources and Rational sources that expose the Rational REST Get Specification. You can configure these data sources to generate documents. By configuring a data source, you locate and access the different properties that can be configured for generating the documents.
The data source instructs the document generation to fetch data from a supported tool. The data from the tool is an .xml file. The syntax of .xml files is commonly defined as XML Schema Definition (*.xsd) files. The standard .xsd files are available in the examples directory of Rational Publishing Engine.
Dynamic data source is a data source that is configured at runtime (and not statically in the document specification) using information read from the user through variables or calculated from other data sources.
Data Source Configuration is the template element used to configure a Dynamic Data Source.
Target data source is the data source that is configured by a Data Source Configuration element.
A data source schema is an XML-based file that defines the structure and properties of the data source. Each field or group in the data source corresponds to an element in the schema. The properties of each field and group in the data source define the structure of the corresponding elements and the data that each element can contain in the resulting document.
Rational Publishing Engine provides the mechanism for creating or obtaining schemas for several data source types such as Rational DOORS, Rational Tau, and Rational RESTfull data sources. You must provide the schema for generic XML files as Rational Publishing Engine uses standard XML schema definition for data source schemas. For more information about the standard schema definition, see http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema. You can use a third-party application to create the schema from the XML data.
The XML Schema Discovery is a tool that you can use to generate a special XML Schema. Using the standard XML Schema, you can access all attributes, and extract the values of specific attributes. This feature is useful if your template often requires values of specific attributes. You can select a schema that closely represents your requirements. You can add the schema to your template. The schema will expose the module, object attributes and content from the view columns in XML attributes. The XML schema also documents the content that a formal module must have in order to be used in documents generated from a specific template.
A document template can contain static and dynamic content. The static content includes the text and images provided when the template is designed. The dynamic content is represented by data obtained from the data sources when the document is generated. The template also defines formatting information. Some data sources can retain the formatting information embedded in the data.
A document template is self-contained and stored as an archive file with the extension .dta (Document Template Archive). You can share, move, and copy a template. Document templates created with previous versions of Rational Publishing Engine work with this version. However, document templates created with one version cannot be used with the previous version.
A document template does not refer to specific data sources. When defining the template, you use the definition of your data structure, which is the schema. This enables the template to be applied to any data source whose structure matches the structure of the defining data source. A template can contain any number of data source schemas.
Optimized for agile teams and methods, MCIF can automate the implementation of any method. Although product-independent, MCIF is supported by IBM Rational Jazz™ offerings that transform software delivery by helping teams collaborate, automate, and report more effectively. See, http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/mcif/.