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Extracting Individual Use Cases from a Word Document into RRC

I have a Use Case document which contains over 200 Use Cases. As an example each one follows a similar format to this in regards to headings:

  • Use Case Name
    • Goal
    • Description
    • Precondition
    • Post Condition
    • Main Success Scenario

Under each heading is descriptive text as appropriate.

What I want to do is, import each Use Case from the above document as its own artifact, so each artifact has the correct name, and within the Primary Text field in RRC, has all the above sub headings with their texts.

At the moment, if I use the inbuilt tool to try and do this, RRC extracts every single sub heading from above as its own individual artifact, so rather than 200 Use Cases, I end up with 4k+ artifacts, which is not helpful!

Is it possible to extract each Use Case from my word document so each becomes a single artifact with the sub headings and associated text for each Use Case in the Primary Text field? I know how to do this manually but need an auto process if it's possible. I am using RRC v4.0.

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Correcting myself:  rather than keywords I think you would use text delimiters in the import wizard to mark the beginning and end of each use case.

After a quick search I haven't turned up any good example data that I can share with you. I suggest you make up your own delimiters in a test doc and play with it.
Steven Witty selected this answer as the correct answer

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In theory that does make more sense, but just pretend for a moment I have no idea what a delimiter is.....

Happy to play with a test document I have, but not sure where to even start. Do I simply add something like "Start" at the beginning and "Stop" at the end? A gentle prompt in the roughly right direction would help :)


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I see two options:
  1. You could use the keyword feature in the import wizard to mark the beginning and end of each use case. Requires you to add the keywords in the Word doc first.
  2. You could import the entire document as one RRC artifact then manually highlight each use case and extract and save it as its own artifact (see icon on the edit menu). With "only" 200 you could probably do this manually in an hour or so.

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Hi Daniel, thanks for the speedy response. Im already familiar with 2 in your answer and am happy to do this if it's the best/only method, but with the expectation of having to do this for a number of other documents, ideally I want a process thats fairly automatic. I would like to get master Use Case document and import the individual Use Cases as single artifacts.

I looked at keywords but couldn't find anything helpful that explains how to use them, how would I set this up? If this works, I could then insist on any future Use Case documents having this built in to them thus making my life a lot easier. Any explanation on how I can use keywords would be hugely helpful.


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I haven't played with importing using text delimiters myself either.  I assume you pick any two strings that will be unique in your document and obvious to a reader that they are not part of the "normal" text.

For example:
  • $$USE-CASE-START$$
  • $$USE-CASE-END$$

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Well Im happy to report that the example you gave does in fact work Daniel, so thanks for that.

On reflection, it would 1) take ages to put them into my document and 2) take longer than just importing as a rich text document and manually extracting them, so that's what Im going to do.

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FYI: If not used in the document, I often use either { and } or [ and ] for my delimiters.

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Just a comment in here, for future readers of this.

It does not take a long time to add delimiters in if you use a pretty basic VBA macro to do so. If enough of you reply OK to this, I will post one up.

IMHO:
  • Don't look to get RRC to do all the work for you. Sounds like you guys have done a great job getting the use cases into one document. Consolidation and review is great for consistency. Don't put garbage into RRC - it won't clean it up for you. 
  • Any program of any decent size (e.g. 200 use cases) should have at least one BA who can do VBA to get the delimiters etc in order. It is pretty easy.
  • You can do a lot with Use Cases - you can even put Flow: in the heading name of a flow, and create a specialised requirement from it, from which you can create a test case or test suite (depending on how you are cutting your cloth).
P

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Question asked: Sep 05 '12, 9:07 a.m.

Question was seen: 6,230 times

Last updated: Apr 29 '13, 6:53 a.m.

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