Designing templates with Rational System Architect 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 System Architect REST service and the various URLs needed to extract data from Rational System Architect using Rational Publishing Engine. To locate the information center for your version of Rational System Architect, see About the Rational System Architect 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. If you are using Design Management, publish the Rational System Architect models to Design Management and use the instructions in Designing templates with Design Management as a data source to design templates for models. If you are not using Design Management, continue with this task.
  2. 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.
  3. In the Document Studio application, create a document template.
  4. Add a data source schema to your document template. For Rational System Architect, you can discover the data source schema by entering the base URL to the application.
    1. In Document Studio, click Data > Schema Discovery > REST Schema Discovery.
    2. Enter a Name for the data source.
    3. Enter a Description for the data source.
    4. Specify the Base URL for the resource. The base URL for Rational System Architect is: https://server:port/rsasuite/com.ibm.rsa.business.enterprise.xsd
    5. Select the Authentication Type from the list. If you do not select a type, each type is tested until the correct type is found, which might increase document generation time.
    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. Click Next. The base URL you entered is automatically appended with ?metadata=schema. Example: https://server:port/rsasuite/com.ibm.rsa.business.enterprise.xsd?metadata=schema
    9. Click Finish. The data source schema you selected displays in the Data Source Schema view.
  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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