Advanced topics about RPE and DOORS Filters

In DOORS there are some special options when you define a DOORS Filter. The “Display Options” add some extra elements to the filtered content. In case when the user check the “Show all table cells” option, then all the tables will appear in the filtered view. This result is a mixture of filtered and non filtered content and the RPE will take into consideration only the filtered content.

Supposing that we have this DOORS Formal module:

Figure 1: Doors Formal Module

We want to create a filter to display all the objects with Object Text attribute starting with “The user shall be able” text. We also want to include in our view all the tables. For this we have to check the option: “Show all table cells”

Figure 2: DOORS Filter Dialog

The result of this view will be:

Figure 3: DOORS view

To generate a document from this view, we will use a simple RPE template, which iterate through all the objects and will also extract all the DOORS tables.

Figure 4: RPE template

If we run this on the filtered view, we will obtain this WORD document:

Figure 5: Word Output

As you can see, there is no table content into our final document. Instead of generating a table with two rows, and each row with two cells, in our document we have a table with two empty rows. This happens because the RPE could not handle the “Show all table cells” option from the filter.

What could be done?

One workaround will be to move the filter from the DOORS side to RPE side. So we need to remove the filter from the DOORS module, and to create exactly the same filter on RPE side, using the script expression.
The filter will look like this:

Figure 6: RPE script filter

The first line filter all those objects that have Object_Text attribute containing the “The user shall be able” text. The second line also adds to the filter all the tables. This happens because a table from DOORS is encapsulated into an empty object. So, including all the objects with no Object Heading and Object Text in fact we add all the objects that contain DOORS tables.

If we run this template using the “Standard view” and not the filtered view, the result will be:

Now, the filtered view looks exactly like our WORD output.