Tutorial: Document generation with Document Builder

Many organizations must produce documentation from their systems and software engineering data that meets complex style and format requirements imposed by clients, business partners, or government or industry regulatory bodies. With the Rational Publishing Engine Document Builder, everyday users can easily produce these documents by using pre-configured reports, with no coding knowledge or additional configuration required.

About this task

Two roles are usually involved in creating a document: the report designer and the everyday user. In this tutorial, Ryan the report designer creates reports from templates that he designed in Document Studio. Susan the everyday user generates the documents from the reports that Ryan developed. Ryan and Susan's manager wants a daily digest of the top 25 headlines from various news sites. Ryan will design the templates and reports, and Susan will generate the documents.

Tip: What's the difference between templates, reports, and documents?

A template is a resource that a report designer creates in Rational Publishing Engine Document Studio using data source schemas, variables and styles. Templates have the file extension .dta.

A report is assembled from one or more templates or stylesheets. Templates correspond to sections of a report. For example, you might have different templates for table of contents, front cover, body, index, and back cover. These templates can be reused in different documents.

A document is generated from a report. Users can find reports that the report designer created and then generate documents with a single click. Documents can be in Microsoft Word, Excel, HTML, PDF or XSL-FO formats.