Data sources and authentication

Data sources can be IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® , generic XML data sources, and other IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management products that expose the REST Get Specification. You can configure these data sources to generate document-style reports. By configuring a data source, you locate and access the different properties that can be configured for generating the document-style reports.

The data source instructs the document-style report generation to fetch data from a supported tool. The data from the tool is in the syntax of .xml files, commonly defined as XML Schema Definition (.xsd) files. The standard .xsd files are available in the PUB_install_dir/source directory of IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Publishing , .

A dynamic data source is a data source that is configured at run time and not statically in the document specification. Dynamic data sources use information read from the user through variables or calculated from other data sources.

Data source authentication

Some data sources require authentication to access the data on a protected server. When Engineering Publishing must retrieve data from a protected server, it tests each authentication type until it finds the correct one for the data source. Instead of waiting for each type to be tested, you can specify authentication types in templates and document specifications with your credentials.

Authentication types

You can enter one of these case-sensitive authentication types in the authentication property for a data source in a template or document specification:
  1. Form
  2. Basic
  3. OAuth-OSLC: You can specify OAuth-OSLC authentication for Generic XML, REST v1, REST v2 data sources.
  4. OAuth: Engineering Publishing supports OAuth authentication types that are specific to Jazz® products. If OAuth authentication is specified, the authentication is handled as OAuth1a.
  5. Smart-Card
  6. SSL Certificate
  7. Kerberos-SPNEGO

If you don't enter an authentication type or auto in Document Studio, each type is tested in numerical order until the correct type is found, and then the authentication type is cached for future connections within a current document-style report generation. Even when subsequent document-style report generation jobs run in the same Launcher or Document Studio instance, the initial auto connection tests each authentication type to find and cache the correct type.

Improve performance by specifying the authentication type

You can improve document-style report generation performance by:
Note: For data sources that support only OAuth1a, you must set the authentication property to OAuth explicitly. An auto-detection algorithm results in failure and the OAuth cannot be verified. This failure occurs because the OAuth1a algorithm falsely reports authentication success. The auto algorithm stops, but the data that is accessed is in fact the login page itself and not the real data.