Document specification

The document specification is an XML file that defines the document templates, data sources, and the output formats to be used. Before documents can be generated, templates and data sources must be connected.

A single document specification can use multiple templates. A document specification can refer to a template more than once in a document specification. For each template instance, a data source must be configured separately. The document specification does not package its templates or other resources. If you move a document specification to a different location or computer, you must move the related templates and resources to a location that is accessible from the new document specification location. The document specification is stored on the file system and creating a document specification does not make any changes in the data source. It associates the data sources with the document template, since the document template associates to the data source schema and not directly to the data source.

You can specify the runtime options like output formats and output destination, the engine to be used, log and debug options. A document specification can be created and edited in the Launcher.

The following table lists the elements of a document specification.
Element Description
Metadata Global settings for document generation.
Output The selected output formats. If the output path is not specified, the output is considered to be unconfigured and marked in red. Unique names for each output type are generated in the current user temporary folder. If you choose to save the HTML output, you must also copy the additional folder and files such as the image folder and style sheet file that are generated for this output type.
TargetConfigured document output Configured document output.
Templates The list of templates used by the document specification.
Data sources The list of data sources that are configured for the template. Each data source in the document specification matches only one data source schema in the template.
Variables The list of variables that are defined in the template. The variables define the values to be used when generating the output.

In addition to defining the template and output formats, you can do the following actions from the document specification menu:

Clean your work area to delete the content of the temporary files and output files that are generated by IBM® Rational® Publishing Engine. However, make sure that you are not running.

Accept header

The accept header's default values for the various data source types will work in most cases. A user only needs to worry about them in few occasions. This way you have a single URL for your resource yet clients of my server can request what they need. In most cases one of the formats is preferred if no accept header is specified.

What is an Accept header?

It is a feature of the HTTP protocol that allows a server to provide different content types on the same URL.

For example, for the following URL http://server/mydata/resource1 there are three ways to provide data, as an image, html or xml. You can then use three different accept types such as image/jpeg, text/html and application/xml. The advantage is that you have a single URL for your resource yet the clients of a server can request what they need. In most cases, one of the formats is preferred if no accept header is specified.
Note: The accept header's default values for the various data source types will work in most cases.

For the RQM OSLC API: By default, if no accept header is specified RQM will return the HTML representation of the resources. You need to set the accept header to application/xml in order to get the XML data.


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