Creating reports from templates

Report designers can upload their templates from Document Studio into the Rational® Publishing Engine web app and turn them into reports that their teams can use to generate documents.

About this task

Although you can create large templates to generate your documents with multiple sections, you can also use a template for each section so that you can quickly assemble small reusable components into one large report. For example, a table of contents template can be used in many different reports.
Important: You must be assigned the Report Designer role to create reports.

Procedure

  1. Open the Design page of the web app.
  2. Upload templates or style sheets:
    1. Click Upload Asset.
    2. Enter a title and description for the template or style sheet and select the type of file to upload.
    3. Browse to find the file, and click Upload.
    The template is added to the list.
    List of templates in Design page
  3. Click Create a report.
  4. In the Available templates list, drag and drop templates to the Templates used in this report column. The order of the templates matches the order the templates are used in the report.
  5. Select the output formats, and enter a name and description for the report.
  6. Add any tags for the report.
  7. Determine the availability of the report. You have two options:
    • Select the Make available for Document Generation check box. The report will appear on the Generate page for users to generate documents from.
    • Do not select this check box to keep the report in draft state, so only report designers or administrators can view it.
    multi-template report design
  8. Click Save or Save and Configure. If you click Save and Configure, you can specify properties to configure data sources, variables, output, and metadata. For example, you can set default data source connections for reports, rename data sources and variables with meaningful names, or hide data sources and variables from end users.
    Configure document properties
  9. If you make changes in Document Studio to a template that you have uploaded, you must update the template in the web app:
    1. In the Edit column, click Update TemplateEdit .
    2. In the Update Template window, edit the fields if needed or browse to the updated template.
    3. Click Update.
  10. To delete a template, in the Actions column, click Delete Delete You can only delete templates or style sheets that are not used in any reports.
  11. To quickly preview a report before you generate a document:
    1. Click the Reports tab on the Design page.
    2. In the Actions column for the report that you want, select the Preview Document icon Preview document.
    3. Connect to a data source if prompted and click Preview.
    4. When the job finishes, click Download Documents Download documents in the Status column. You can save the document or .zip file containing the document and log file.
  12. To see all the reports that use a particular asset, in the Actions column, click Show Reports. A window opens that lists the reports that use this template or stylesheet, and whether the report is on a schedule.

Results

You can see the report on the Generate page.

What to do next

Generate a document from the report.

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