By Nick Entin
1 Introduction
1.1 Objective and Target User
The MS Office Word Importer for Polarion (“Importer” ) migrates existing Requirements or other types of work items, described in a MS Word document format to Polarion. The Importer is targeted at Administrators, Business Analysts, and Requirements Engineers with Polarion user training as a pre-requisite.
The Importer allows requirements data currently in MS Office Word format to be imported into Polarion for reuse without needing to recreate them in the Polarion portal. The Importer follows these basic process steps:
- Recognizes MS Word document parts representing the work items (i.e. Requirements), and associated attributes such as descriptions, content, graphics, etc. to be imported.
- Establishes the mapping properties of the MS Word document artifact data to be imported to Polarion, mapping properties of the artifact to the Polarion model – e.g. setting the title of the work item, description and other attributes.
- Enables recognition of the MS Word document structure and reproduction of the same hierarchy in Polarion.
1.2 How this works
The principle of the Importer is relatively simple – each paragraph in the document represents potential work item or its attribute. Styles, applied to the paragraphs, allow recognition and mapping to the desired model.
This way, heading-formatted paragraphs could be mapped to titles of corresponding work items, and all text in between should go to description. Heading levels describe the parent-child relationship of the data objects. For instance, Heading 2-formatted text may be mapped to a child work item of the corresponding Heading 1.
It is also possible that style-highlighted parts of the text will be mapped to attributes of work item. For example, the name of a person is highlighted as “Author” style in document, and the name will be used as assignee of the work item during the import.
Naturally, every author likes to format his/her document with nice styling, applying company-branding and so forth. Therefore, before the Importer can process a document, it should be taught the applied styles and their semantics.
Importer is a Java application, connecting over Web Services to Polarion server. This means that the application will connect via HTTP/HTTPS protocol to the server, so the user must have a LAN/Internet connection to Polarion server during entire import, and must also have a user account in Polarion and be able to supply a valid user ID and password.
Parsing capabilities of the Importer are based on the open source project Apache POI (http://poi.apache.org/), and is itself an open source project. More details as well as link to the sources may be found here:
1.3 Prerequisites
The Importer can import binary documents, saved in MS Word 97-2003 format. If you use later versions of MS Office, you should use Save as > Word 97-2003 Document to convert it to an importable format.
The user who is going to import document should have an active account in Polarion an be able to supply a valid user name and password. Also, the account should be associated with a Polarion Requirements or Polarion ALM license.
As Importer runs as a batch application, the user should be have the necessary permissions to call programs from command line, and be able to create and update configuration files in a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad.
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