Need a way to order the items using the Export to Word Template (Jama orders by heading)

Edward Choi
edited September 2016 in
Hi,

we're using the Export to Word functionality quite a bit and one of our users had me stumped.

Is there a way to order what items get exported to Word, without using the Project Tree?

We know we can use the Filtered View to export from, and we can order the filtered view by, say, date modified. But then when we export from this ordered filtered view it reverts to the order in the project tree.

This may be useful, for example, if we want to put the list of changes at the front of the document, along with the most recently changed items, but we don't want to reorder the whole project to put those items at the top in the project tree.

Seems to me that a logical WYSIWYG may be to output the items in the order they appear in the view the user is exporting from. Can this be done?

Are there any other ways of ordering the word export?

Thanks,

Ed

Comments

  • swoo Woo
    edited September 2016
    Hi Ed, thanks for posting this question. As far as I know there is no configuration or Word export template settings that allow a user to export Jama data to Word while honoring the list view order. I assume Jama maps the heading level/sequence field to Word paragraph heading level.

    The only work-around that may be possible is to write a Word VBA macro to reorder items in the exported Word file based on a sort field.

    Perhaps Velocity is another possibility but I have zero knowledge in that area. Perhaps some reporting experts like @Shawnaa can chime in about Velocity. I almost thinks it's is feasible since Velocity can export from the listview context.

    Good luck

    Swoo
  • Kristina King
    edited June 2016
    Ed, thanks for posing this question—it's a great one for everyone who exports items to be familiar with! When exporting via the default Word template or to a custom Word template, the items are always going to be exported according to heading. That said, because BIRT and Velocity allow logic to be applied, a custom report using one of the advanced engines would be a better option.
  • Edward Choi
    edited July 2016
    Hi Kristina,

    Could we get this put in as a feature request? Our users aren't very sophisticated in writing the custom reports, or VBA macros, and it'd be tough for me to write a special one each time (I'm not that proficient myself, and writing custom report generators for each user doesn't scale well to thousands of users). It'll be much easier to have them reorder items themselves using a sort field within the list view and export WYSIWYG.

    Thanks,

    Ed
  • Kristina King
    edited June 2016
    That makes sense to me—I've updated this topic to an Idea so we can consider it as such.
  • I would like to upvote/echo this feature request, as the lack of item sorting into Word exports causes us a lot of headaches.  It is especially problematic when one needs to generate a report of test run results. 

    We commonly need to perform verification tests on multiple samples of a product, so we create reused/synched test cases for each sample needed.  For exporting test cases you can order items in the project explorer tree, but no matter how the test cases are ordered, test runs are created with a hidden heading sequence that does not match the sequence of the source test cases.  So, in effect there is no way within Jama to ensure that a group of test runs (e.g., Test Sample 01, Test Sample 02, ...,Test Sample 50) will be exported into a document with any sort of logical order.

    ------------------------------
    Trent
    Plexus Corp (On-Premise)
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    Original Message:
    Sent: 06-25-2015 23:36
    From: Kristina King
    Subject: Re: Need a way to order the items using the Export to Word Template (Jama orders by heading)

    That makes sense to me-I've updated this topic to an Idea so we can consider it as such.