What's the best way to handle OLE object such as MS Excel Chart in RRC 401/DOORS NG 401
When I imported a word document containing MS Excel chart object to RRC 401, the OLE object become an image after import and is not editable anymore. Is this expected behavior? What about Visio Object?
So what's the recommended way to import a document with OLE to DOORS NG/RRC 401. I expect to see the diagram and be able to continue to edit it.
If the user directly use DOORS NG/RRC 401 to create requirement, how can he insert an OLE object such as Visio or MS Excel chart into a rich text artifact? The same effect is expected: user can see the diagram and be able to edit it.
Thanks a lot!
2 answers
If you upload an artifact (e.g., a spreadsheet) you'll end up with a an artifact you can put into other things. In a limited number of cases in RRC/DNG 4.0.1, when you embed one of these artifacts, when viewiing the container, you'll see an option to "view using OLE".
The one example, that you can (reliably) try is upload a pdf file, then in a module add ti uploaded pdf file to the module. After saving, you'll see in the module an option to to "show the embedded artifact inline".
This is the first example of how we'd like to handle as many kinds of "embedded files" as possible.
There are quite a number of technical issues though in this process. On the web, objects displayed through OLE are as a rule not editable (there are some hacky ways this can be worked around). The bigger issue is that most kinds of artifacts do not support showing things through OLE containers run in a web browser. Some hacks exist here as well, but they can be problematic.
To help us get this working, it would be very useful if you could provide very specific information about exactly the kind of artifact you'd like to be able to see in an "OLE container" launched through the web browser and if you know of working examples of it. For example, exactly the version of an Excel spreadhsheet you'd like to embed in a rich text artifact. And whether you've seen a web page with an OLE embedded Excel spreadsheet of that version anywhere (Microsoft, for most versions of Office, does not provide OLE containers for their artifact types that are supported within IE or other browsers, it takes a substantial amount of hacking to make this work and it's very version-specific).
So the more specific information you can give us, the better we'll be able to work out whether we can support the kind of OLE integration you are looking for -- we have to add support for specific kinds of file formats, one file format at a time.
When a word document is imported in to RRC 401, the resource is wrapped in to an artifact and get uploaded in to the RRC. Importing the document as wrapped resource intends to provide a WAY to bring OLE data in to the system. I think it was not intended to be able to edit the OLE data directly from the System.
I would suggest you to raise an enhancement request to provide this capability of OLE data to be extracted from the word document as wrapped resources.
Thanks,
Abhishek.