Limitations for LQE-based reporting in CLM 6.0 >

Configuration management setup

• Only the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) application supports configurations and versioned resources. The Rational data warehouse does not.
• In 6.0, the Report Builder support for LQE based reports is considered a technology preview. The meta-data in LQE that is required by the Report Builder to create reports is not complete or is invalid. Also, there is missing or unusable resource data that is needed by basic reports. Therefore, when building a report, the Report Builder editor will hide all LQE based data sources until the technology preview license has been viewed and activated. To do this the administrator should go to the Report Builder's Data Sources page and click Activate Technology Preview.
• By default LQE hides its configuration aware SPARQL endpoints until at least one application Tracked Resource Set (TRS) feed publishes a configuration with versioned resources. Therefore, when the Report Builder connects to its known data sources, it will only create the LQE data source and not the LQE using Configurations data source.
• Both Rational Quality Manager (RQM) and Rational Doors Next Generation (DNG) support configuration management but this feature must first be enabled. The administrator must obtain a configuration management license key from IBM support and set that license key in the corresponding application administration page (.../[application]/admin), in the “Local Versioning Component” Advanced Property. After clicking Save, configuration management is enabled and the administrator must enable configuration management for desired project areas by editing a project area. In the Configuration Management tab of the editor, click *Enable Configuration Management.
• In 6.0, although both RQM and DNG support configurations, only RQM publishes configurations and versioned resources to LQE. Because DNG does not publish any configuration information to LQE, DNG only publishes the resources from the initial stream of a configuration-enabled DNG project area.
• After one RQM project area has been enabled for configurations and its TRS feed in LQE has performed an update, LQE will expose its configuration-aware SPARQL endpoints. The administrator must go to the Report Builder's Admin page and click Connect to Data Sources again. This will discover the newly exposed LQE endpoints and create the LQE using Configurations data source.
• When a Global Configuration (GC) is created which associates configurations in RQM and DNG, that GC can be used in those tools. Although the GC is also published to LQE, it only contains references to the RQM and DNG configurations and since DNG configurations are NOT published, the GC is effectively the same as the associated RQM configuration.
• If the data warehouse (DW) was set up, when a project area in RQM or DNG is enabled for configurations, the resources for that project area are no longer updated in the DW and the corresponding project data is considered archived by the DW. This means that DW reports will not return any data for configuration-enabled project areas.
• In 6.0, RQM and RTC define a second TRS feed for LQE to publish process related resources such as Project Area, Team Area, Iteration and Timeline. In addition, the resources published by RQM and RTC contain extra triples referring to these process resources. Report Builder uses the Project Area resources to limit the scope of LQE based reports, which requires the corresponding resources to be published with those extra triples. As a result, when upgrading to 6.0, LQE administrators must re-index the RQM and RTC TRS feeds. In 6.0, RQM also added a second TRS 2.0 feed (.../qm/trs2) for their resources so instead of re-indexing the old RQM TRS 1.0 feed (.../qm/trs), the LQE administrator should remove the old feed and add the new one.
• Normally in the Report Builder, the LQE data sources are created automatically when you click Connect to Data Sources and the Report Builder will detect and create the all-data LQE data source before it creates the configuration-aware data source. If you create data sources manually in Report Builder to a remote LQE, you must create the all-data LQE data source first (.../lqe/sparql) before you create the configuration-aware LQE data source (.../lqe/sparql-variable-config). The all-data LQE data source is needed to both obtain the meta-data required by Report Builder and also to find available configurations. If a request is sent to the .../lqe/sparql-variable-config endpoint without a header containing a configuration URI, the 400 error occurs.

LQE-based reporting limitations

• With an LQE data source, there are multiple sources of meta-data that are used by the Report Builder editor. Published vocabularies can define basic cross-project and cross tool types such as the OSLC types Change Request, Test Case, Test Plan, Requirement, etc. In addition, some of the tools also publish vocabularies to define more tool specific types, such as Work Item. Thirdly, some tools, such as RQM and DNG, publish OSLC resource shapes which extend an OSLC type. These resource shapes typically define additional tool specific properties (attributes and relationships) that are not defined on the underlying OSLC type.
• For RQM and DNG, the resource shapes are project-specific so for a specific type such as an OSLC Test Case, there will be a separate “QM Test Case” resource shape published for each RQM project area. In the Report Builder editor, the artifact section lists the base OSLC types with an expansion symbol. When an OSLC type is expanded, the contained list is the set of resource shapes that extend that OSLC type.
• For RQM and DNG, the resource shapes are project-specific so for a specific type such as an OSLC Test Case, there will be a separate “QM Test Case” resource shape published for each RQM project area. In the Report Builder editor, the artifact section lists the base OSLC types with an expansion symbol. When an OSLC type is expanded, the contained list is the set of resource shapes that extend that OSLC type.
• When a project-specific resource shape type is selected in the Report Builder, only resources of that type in the corresponding project area will be returned in the report results. Therefore in 6.0, resource shape types cannot be used for cross-project reporting or cross tool reporting. For these types of reports, the OSLC types must be used. Unfortunately, such reports are limited to the attributes and relationships defined by the OSLC types.
• In the Report Builder artifact section, when the Work Item entry is expanded, it contains a list of known work item types that can be selected. These types are in a multiple selection list and correspond to a generated condition in the report. When the (OSLC) Test Case type is expanded, it contains a list of derived resource shape types. This list however is a single selection list because each entry is a distinct type. When you select an entry, the base OSLC type is cleared. Therefore, to create a cross-project report, select the OSLC type and do not select any of its derived types.
• For 6.0, the RQM resource shape types include the name of the corresponding project area so that the report author can tell which project the shape is associated with. Unfortunately, DNG resource shape types do not identify the project area. The DNG shapes for one project area cannot be distinguished from those for another DNG project area and as a result, the Report Builder only displays one set of the resource shapes, which seems to correspond to the last DNG project area created. Therefore it is not possible to report on requirements using a DNG resource shape type if the resource resides in a different DNG project area. However, the base OSLC requirement types can still be used.
• In 6.0, only RTC and RQM publish project area information to LQE. If you are creating a report that only involves artifact types for Change Management and Quality Management, then in the Report Builder editor you can select the projects used to restrict the results. Only resources from the selected projects will be considered. Therefore if you select RTC and RQM projects but the traceability relationships include requirements, the report will not show any requirements, even if they exist. In this situation, the Report Builder editor should give you a warning that results may be missed. The workaround is to not select any projects in the scoping section but instead to define a “Project Area” condition on the RTC and RQM artifact types, selecting the desired projects.
• There will be situations where the Report Builder might generate a SPARQL query with a syntax error. If this happens, a SPARQL parsing syntax error will be displayed usually giving the line number and column of where the syntax is incorrect. Open the Advanced section in the editor and you might be able to determine the generated SPARQL that is causing the error and possibly alter your report definition to fix it.
• With the removal of back-links in 6.0, a relationship property between two resources in LQE may only contain a reference (link) in the source resource. The metadata for that source type will include the relationship property (to the target type) but the metadata for the target type may not contain a relationship property to the source type. The Report Builder has the ability to identify such a property as a reversible relationship. For a reversible property, the Report Builder will inject a relationship property (to the source type) into the metadata for the target type and then generate the SPARQL query in such a way as to discover the reference to the target resource from the source resource. Unfortunately not all of these reversible relationship properties have been identified. In addition, the metadata for some target types may still define a relationship property to the source type (assuming the back-link existed) but none of the corresponding target resources actually contain a value for that property.
• Reporting on RQM projects that are not enabled for configurations must use the LQE data source. If the LQE using Configurations data source is used with an RQM resource shape type for a non-enabled project, there will be no results. Conversely, reporting on RQM projects that are enabled for configurations must use the LQE using Configurations data source or else the results will be very large and inaccurate. When the LQE data source is used, the properties for all versions of the resources are extracted and the report results will include a cross-product of all property values.
• In 6.0, the Report Builder does not provide any out-of-the-box reports for either LQE or LQE using configurations.
• The Report Builder has a known UI scalability issue with regards to resource shape types. For every RQM project area there will be a set of resource shape types, one for each test resource type. If you have many RQM project areas (more than 50) and you attempt to create a traceability relationship where the target type is one of these test types, the UI creates a request to the server to obtain the names of the target types where the request URI includes all of the target type URIs. As a result, the length of the request URI exceeds the limit imposed by most browsers. In the UI, when you select such a relationship it would normally display a list of target types to choose from but when the URI length is exceeded, an error occurs and the list is not displayed.

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