You can define IBM® Rational® Change as a data source
in IBM Rational Publishing Engine.
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 a template with the REST sample data.
Before you begin
- Get familiar with the Rational Change
REST service and the various URLs needed to extract data from Rational Change using Rational Publishing Engine.
To locate the information center for your version of Rational Change, seeAbout the Rational Change
information center.
- Connect to a data source schema. See Adding data source schema.
- Schema can be on the local file system. For example, https://server:port/ibm/report/com.ibm.change.project.artifacts.xsd is
a schema file that uses artifacts argument. You
can use this schema to add specific data pieces from your Rational Change project.
- Schema can be any URI that is accessible from the computer. You
can construct a URL that points to the data source schema. Open your
data source schema and, from the XML file, take the URI for a particular
resource. Add ?metadata=schema to the end of
the URI. For example: https://server:port/ibm/report/com.ibm.change.project.artifacts.xsd
- You can use the elements in the data source schema to add queries
in your template. These queries specify what pieces of information
are ultimately generated in the report.
- After you connect to the data source schema, you can create or
import a template design. With Rational Publishing Engine Document
Studio, you can build a report template design. This design determines
the layout of the report. See Designing templates with Document Studio.
- Plan the structure of your document and define the content to
extract data. See Template development process to
get an overview of the template development process. For large documents,
you can create separate templates for each document block.
- You can use filters, which are more specific 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 Rational Change repository
during report generation. These filters must be broad enough to retrieve
all of the necessary data referenced by the template or the generated
report does include the complete set of data. See Extracting
data using native filters.
- After you create the report template and populate it with Rational Change data points,
you can generate a report in various formats. When you generate a
report, you must connect to the data source by specifying a URI that
points to the Rational Change
repository that contains the relevant data. See Creating a document specification.
- If data source schemas are added to a template after
the template is assigned to a document specification, the document
specification becomes out of sync. You can manually
synchronize the document specification or select a preference
option to automatically synchronize the document specification with
the current template. See Setting the Document Studio preferences for information about how to set
the Keep Document Specification synchronized with the current
Template? preference.
- Before you publish your document, see the Specifying output properties topic
for more information about the available output options that you can
choose from and which one is best to use for the elements you are
using in your template.
- You are now ready to publish your document. See Publish
your document.