Creating Tables in Document Publisher

Generating Document Publisher Tables

There are various methods of generating Document Publisher tables. This short post provides a brief explanation of the following methods:

Table Tag

A Table tag allows you to generate uniform tables where the resulting items are reported in rows. This can be a list of individual items or links to other items using a defined hierarchy. Below shows an example definition of both.

  1. Insert a Table tag:

    Insert Table Tag button
    Insert Table Tag button
  2. Add Field tags into the table cells:
    Field Tags
    Field Tags
    Tables in Document Publisher
    Tables in Document Publisher

    This will output the examples below:

    Table showing FEATUREs
    Table showing FEATUREs
Table showing System Requirements
Table showing System Requirements

WorkBench Table Tag

Many tables will probably have been used as a result of queries in WorkBench. For example, one shown here is a list of System Requirements linked to SBS items:

SRs linked to SBS
SRs linked to SBS items

These tables can be used as a WorkBench Table tag in a Document Publisher output:

WorkBench Table Tag button
WorkBench Table Tag button
Example WorkBench Table Tag
Example WorkBench Table Tag
WorkBench Table Tag Properties
WorkBench Table Tag Properties

This is a quick and easy method of producing tables without any need for defining Field tags as the table attributes are already defined in WorkBench. An example output is shown below:

WorkBench Table Output
WorkBench Table Output

Inserting into Table Cells

Document Publisher also provides the ability to insert data into table cells by the use of a special Computed Insert_Table_From_Bkmk Field tag. The steps to achieve this are:

  1. Insert a Word table and format as appropriate:
    Word Insert Table option
    Word Insert Table option

    Inserted Word table
    Inserted Word table
  2. Highlight the table and insert a Word bookmark:

    Insert Word Bookmark option
    Insert Word Bookmark option
  3. Before the table, insert a Paragraph Group tag and define the item type that you would like to shown in the table. For example – FEATURE items:

    Example Paragraph Group tag
    Example Paragraph Group tag
  4. The first Field tag is very important as this specifies that the fields are going to be inserted into the table using the bookmark TABLE_1 that was defined. In this example, we also create a hierarchy to show linked NEED items and PBS items:

    FEATURE hierarchy
    FEATURE hierarchy
  5. In subsequent Field tags, you can insert into a specified row and column of the table. In this first tag, it is inserting the FEATURE identity attribute into cell column 1, row 1:

    Inserting FEATURE identity
    Inserting FEATURE identity
  6. You can see here that another one of the Field tags is inserting the FEATURE TEXT frame into column 1, row 3 of the table:

    Insert FEATURE TEXT frame
    Insert FEATURE TEXT frame

Once you have specified all of the cells to be populated in the table, this can then be published like the example shown below:

FEATURE output
FEATURE output