Integrating Rational Tau and Rational Publishing Engine
You can define IBM® Rational® Tau as
a data source in IBM Rational Publishing Engine.
Note: If you are running Rational Publishing Engine and Rational Tau on Linux computers, disable the Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) feature. With SELinux
enabled, the application might crash when extracting data from Rational Tau.
Connect to a data source schema. See Adding a data source schema.
You can use the elements in the data source schema to add queries
to your template. These queries specify what pieces of information
are generated in the report. To automatically generate a data source
schema using the predefined schema built from the Rational Tau metamodel,
see Retrieving a Rational Tau data source schema.
Create or import a template design. With the Rational Publishing Engine Document
Studio, you can build a report template design. See Authoring templates with Document Studio.
After you connect to the data source schema, you can plan the
structure of your document and define the content to extract data.
See Designing document templates to
get an overview of the template development process. For large documents
you can create separate templates for each document block.
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.
See Template elements in the Palette view for more details.
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 data
source during report generation. These filters must be broad enough
to retrieve all of the necessary data referenced by the template or
the generated report cannot include a complete set of data. See Extracting
data using native filters and Filter conditions supported by REST native filters for
more information.
You can use a cast query filter to refine the
results of a query. The type casting feature works as an alternate
filter for data source elements, see Type casting and Rational Tau attributes for
details.
After you create the report template and populate it with Rational Tau data
points, you can generate a report in various formats. When you generate
a report, you must connect to the data source that contains the information
about which you want to run the report. To point to the relevant data,
see Connecting to the Rational Tau data source.
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 design 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.
Rational Tau attributes
An attribute can be used to define the content of a template
element for Rational Tau data
sources or in expressions that calculate the content of a template
element or formatting capabilities of a template element. After queries
are assigned to template elements, all of the attributes of the elements
returned by the queries can be used.