Exporting to Table to create a form

I've used DOORS for managing requirements, but I haven't ever done any work on scripting to exportfrom DOORS into "formal documents".

I'm trying to determine if the following possible, and if so does anyone have any sample templates for how to do the "scripting"?

I have a DOORS module that I am hoping to use to populate a WORD table or EXCEL file to make a neat form. Most of the fields will be in DOORS to start with and the remainder we would like to import later on from the form entries.

At this point I would be happy with the time savings by simply populating the fields of the form with the data currently in DOORS.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
Carol
csr2382 - Mon Apr 26 12:13:12 EDT 2010

Re: Exporting to Table to create a form
Mathias Mamsch - Wed Apr 28 03:53:37 EDT 2010

Hey Carol, writing exporters for MS Office is a little awkward. The first thing is you need to know the COM API of your target (Word, Excel) very well to get results. Secondly you need to know, how to use COM from DOORS properly - you can run into some pitfalls there (like Excel staying open in the background or handling errors correctly). If you do not have done a lot of scripting in DOORS you will face a hard time.

Anyway there are examples -> The most basic one is in the DXL help file (Ole Objects/Automation Client support) where you can see how to fill an excel cell from a DOORS DXL script. Starting from there you can built your way up. You can also have a look at the built in exporters (%DOORSHOME%/lib/dxl/standard/export) which are a little more advanced.

The third option would be to use an existing export software, which is probably a good idea, if you need to do an export often and reliably.

When I read that you want to reimport the data from the excel/word I am getting a little nervous. I created a solution once, where we stored data in DOORS, exported it to a very nice excel sheet, sent it to the users (who did not want to work in DOORS) they edited it there, sent it back and we imported it back to DOORS. Believe me, this will create a HUGE amount of extra work for all participants. I can only advice to leave alone these "offline" editing solutions - DOORS is defintively not designed for something like this. If people don't want to work in DOORS it might be best to think about customizations or even another tool to store the data in.

Hope this helps, regards, Mathias

Mathias Mamsch, IT-QBase GmbH, Consultant for Requirement Engineering and DOORS