Ryan the report designer: Designing reports from templates

Report designers upload templates that they created in Document Studio into Publishing Document Builder, where they can assemble the templates into a report that any user on their team can generate a document-style report from. Follow along with Ryan.

1. Open the Resources tab of Publishing Document Builder.
2. First Ryan must upload the templates that he created into the list of templates.
   Tip: You can import sample templates, reports, and data source connections by using the Click here to generate the ready-to-use resources link. You can use the following resources in this tutorial: News feed and Closing page templates, and Standard PUB Format style sheet. If you use these resources, you can skip uploading the templates and style sheet and move to step 4.
   1. Click Upload resource.
   2. In the Name field, enter News feed.
   3. Select the default type, Templates.
   4. To store the template in a folder, click Select folder and then choose or create a folder.
   5. Browse to find the file.
   6. Add tags to the resource so that you can easily find the resource later.
   7. Click Upload.
   8. Repeat these steps to add the template for the closing page.
   The RSS feed template and the closing page template are added to the list.
3. Next, Ryan wants to add a style sheet to work with.
   1. Click Upload resource.
   2. Specify a name for the style sheet.
   3. In the Type field, select Style sheets.
   4. To store the style sheet in a folder, click Select folder and then choose or create a folder
   5. Browse to find the file.
   6. Add tags to the resource so that you can easily find the resource later.
   7. Click Upload.
4. Now Ryan can assemble the templates into a report. It is important to put the templates in the order that you want them to appear in the finished document-style report. Click Create report.
   1. Drag the News Feed template from the Available templates list to the Templates used in this report list.
   2. Repeat this step to add the Closing page template.
   Tip: The templates are listed in the order that they appear in the report. After you have dragged the templates into the report, you can change the order. You can also add the same template as many times as needed in one report.
5. Ryan's manager has asked him to provide both PDF and Microsoft Word output, so Ryan selects these options.
6. Ryan wants to apply the style sheet to the Microsoft Word output, so he selects the *.dot style sheet under the Microsoft Word checkbox.
7. Ryan names the report Daily News and saves the report.
   He leaves the Make available for document generation checkbox clear because he is not yet ready to share the report with his team.
8. Ryan wants to quickly test the document-style report before he shares the report with his team.
   1. Click Back to Resources to return to the Resources tab.
   2. Click the Reports tab on the Resources tab.
      The name of the report is appended with [Draft] because it is not available to users yet.
   3. In the Actions column for the report that you want, select the Preview document-style report icon .
   4. Ryan is prompted to associate a data source connection with the report. He wants to use an RSS feed from Jazz®.net and clicks the Don't see a connection? Create one link.
      1. Enter a title and description for the feed.
      2. Add the URL to the data source. This example uses RSS feeds so Ryan enters https://jazz.net/library/rss/.
      3. This particular data source is publicly accessible so Ryan leaves the authentication fields blank.
      4. Save the connection.

      Note: Ryan might also define the data source connections before he created any reports.
   5. In the Connection list, Ryan selects the Jazz.net connection.
   6. Enter any tags for the document-style report.
   7. To store the report in a folder, click Select folder and then choose or create a folder.
   8. To share the results of the document-style report generation job with your team, select the Share report results checkbox.
      Important: If the user with pub_admin role sets the property Results sharing enabled to false in Permission and sharing section of Runtime variables tab, you cannot see Share report results checkbox.
   9. To assign owners to the document-style report, click Add owners to add the available users in IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Publishing. Select the users from Choose job owners window. The selected users become the owners of the document-style report with the same privileges as the creator of the document-style report.
   10. Ryan clicks OK, and the name of the owners is added in the Owners field.
   11. Ryan can preview and generate the document-style report or schedule it to generate later.
       Note:

       The Closing page example template prompts for a value for the endingTitle variable. Enter some text such as End of Document. Click Preview to preview the document-style report or click Generate.

       Preview shows the first 10 records from each query and Generate creates the document-style report with all the records from each query.
   12. When the job finishes, click Download document-style reports icon in the Status column.
   13. Ryan opens the downloaded .zip file to check the contents of the document-style report.
   14. He is satisfied with the generated document-style report, so he shares the report with his team by clicking Edit report in the Edit column.
   15. Ryan selects the Make available for document generation checkbox and clicks Update. Now the report is no longer in draft state and Susan can generate a document-style report from this report.