Inserting a file as an object into the Word output document offers several advantages over hyperlinks. First, users can transfer output documents with embedded objects (compound Word document) to other computers or mail them without breaking any links. Second, users can edit embedded objects without changing the content of the original. Sometimes, this separation is precisely what is required. These embedded objects can be edited using the applications which created the source files.

Here is an example that shows how to embed attachments from point products (ex. Rational Quality Manager) as objects in Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) output document. The attachment files could be of any format such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, image, etc. These files are downloaded during document generation and the local file path is used as the hyperlink address. We will use a post processing macro that iterates the hyperlinks and insert the corresponding files as OLE objects.

Template Design (Sample):

Steps:

1. Configure document specification
2. Copy RQMUrlUtility.jar (https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/RQMURLUtility) to the location set in attachmentsPath variable.
   • Set variable attachmentsPath to location where the files to be downloaded. By default, it is C:\Attachments
   • Set RQM Username and Password to qmUser and qmPassWord variables respectively.
3. Generate document.

 Word output (Sample):

The accompanying Rational Publishing Engine template, document specification, stylesheet along with RQMURLUtility can be downloaded from here.

Note: The execution of commands is disabled by default in RPE 1.3 and later versions. You can enable command execution by setting the com.ibm.rational.rpe.enable_commands property to true in %rpe_home%\studio\rpe-studio.ini and %rpe_home%\launcher\rpe-launcher.ini.

Disclaimer: Any code or file accessible or downloadable in this post is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. IBM does not provide support for this.

Subramanya Prasad Pilar
Persistent Systems
subramanya_pilar@persistent.com