by Fariz Saracevic
IBM Engineering (ELM) delivered their third release this year, ELM 7.0.2. Looking back at 2020, ELM already delivered two feature rich releases this year and it is exciting to finish the year with one more. This blog covers highlights of theIBM Engineering reporting applications including:
- IBM Engineering Jazz Reporting Service v7.0.2
- IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Publishing v7.0.2
- IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Engineering Insights v7.0.2
I am excited to share a few key enhancements focused on improving usability and overall productivity making Engineering teams life simpler.
Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) v7.0.2
- Report Builder supports ELM artifact name changes – Earlier, JRS v7.0.0 introduced feature to validate reports before generation when JRS report is not working due to either renamed or missing artifacts. This was so that individuals working on evolving their specific ELM artifacts types and information model could identify impact of change to the JRS reports and to notify report owners to re-create impacted reports. This was far from an ideal situation, since sometimes significant time was invested in creating JRS reports. When using JRS v7.0.2, users will see a warning icon with supporting hover text when a report has missing or renamed artifacts. They can click this warning icon to replace a missing artifact, and users can successfully save the report after all missing artifacts are replaced.
Image of the Trace relationships and add artifacts section with warning icons over artifacts:
- Change default grouping for reports, schedules, and results – Over the past few releases JRS introduced support for organizing JRS artifacts, reports and schedules, using folders. JRS still has option to view these assets using tags. As users are moving to the folder mode, there is a need to easily switch their reporting assets view. JRS v7.0.2 allows users to change the default grouping on the My reports, All reports, My schedules, All schedules, My results, and All results pages. The Group by list is enhanced to appear as a menu and an additional Change default grouping option is available for this purpose. If you do not change the default grouping, by default the records are grouped by tag.
Image of the Group by menu (before and after):
Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Publishing (PUB) v7.0.2 (previously Rational Publishing Engine)
- Enhancement to Resource and Configuration pickers – Publishing Document Builder (PUB DB) connection creation process is smarter now. If your PUB DB deployment is registered with a Jazz Team server (JTS), the JTS Server name is pre-populated in the host details field of Resource and Configuration pickers when you you add or edit a connection.
Image of resource picker in Document Builder:
- Skipping invalid data during document generation – We have seen cases in which someone is generating a document with hundreds of pages, and somewhere in the middle data provider application returns invalid XML or JSON data. At this point, document generation stopped. PUB v7.0.2 allows users to set ignore the invalid data and continue to generate the document. A new property named Ignore Invalid Data Errors is added to the metadata of PUB Launcher and PUB DB. When this property is set to true, PUB skips the invalid data and still generates the document. Additional details on this topic can be learned watching Document Generation Resilience video.
Image of Ignore Invalid Data Errors from PUB Launcher and PUB Document Builder:
Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Engineering Insights (ENI) v7.0.2 (previously IBM Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager)
- Enhanced view building experience – How much time have you spent creating your ideal ENI views? If there is one thing that view authors tell us they would like to have that would save them time, it’s to preserve the node definitions as a style and use that style across their views. We delivered this in ENI v7.0.2.
Image of View style window:
- ENI view consumers can view the percentage of artifacts – ENI already provides a way to view artifacts count in a view, but often users want to see percentage as well or instead of a count. View consumers can now view the percentage of artifacts that meet a defined conditions, and ENI displays the percentage in the container.
Image of target container that shows percentage of artifact and no result output:
You can find out about other ELM reporting improvements in the new & noteworthy posts: JRS 7.0.2, PUB 7.0.2 and ENI 7.0.2.
Let us know what you think about our latest release and share this blog post with your peers.
Fariz Saracevic
IBM Engineering Reporting (JRS, PUB, ENI) Offering Management