Designing a website template

You can design a template that System Architect Publisher will use to generate the website. You can decide which reports to run to gather information from encyclopedias to include in the website. You can modify sample reports for use with System Architect Publisher or you can create new reports for your purposes.

Note Before you can build a website with System Architect Publisher, you must decide what information to include in the website. You must design the overall navigation of the information that you want to present, from top level down, and the specific type of information that you need to provide to your readers.

1 Design the website hierarchy.

2 Prepare the reports.

3 Generate the website.

You must design the hierarchy of the website. For example, you can create an overall picture of what information the finished website should present, what information will be on the home page, and what reports will be run to get information to the different viewers of the website. This is a manual phase where you do your thinking and no System Architect Publisher tool is involved.

1 A list of target readers, and what type of information each will be interested in. During this step, you decide what kind of information you want to present for the different types of viewers that you have. For example, you can assign the audience of the website to the following groups:

CEO and corporate management: This group is interested in high-level business concept diagrams, business process diagrams, functional diagrams, and Use Case diagrams of the overall systems, network diagrams of the organizations servers and locations but in a simple, high-level pictorial view.

General readership: This group is interested in process flow diagrams and organizational charts. From the process flow diagrams, they want to find information on types of data collected such as types of tables and their column names, but not include design-level details.

Partners: This group is interested in business process flow diagrams, especially on workflow that concerns inter-company communications, and diagrams detailing interface to the

Programmers: This group is interested in design-level detail of application architecture, database models, and component diagrams.

2 A sketch of the hierarchy of information that you want to provide. This sketch can help you to determine the reports that you need to write to present information to your particular viewers. The top of the hierarchy determines what 'starting' reports you will need.

3 An outline of what the home page will present to your general readership.

When you understand what information you need to include in the website, you can start preparing the reports.

1 List the reports to run to generate the website.

2 Use the reporting system to create the new reports, or select reports from those that are included with System Architect Publisher.

3 Edit the reports in text mode so you can use them with System Architect Publisher.

To create a template that generates a website of information, complete the following steps in System Architect Publisher:

1 Start System Architect Publisher.

2 Specify the starting report or starting reports for the website generation template (Specify Reports tab).

3 (Optional) Specify default reports that you want to run for every diagram, symbol, and definition encountered during the generation process (Class Defaults tab).

4 Specify default reports that you want to run for every type of diagram, symbol, and definition encountered during the generation process. A type of diagram, for example, is a Use Case diagram, or a Physical Data Model, and so on. A type of symbol is an actor symbol or a Use Case symbol, and so on. A type of definition is a class definition or a Use Case definition, and so on (Type Defaults tab).

5 Specify alternative reports that you want to run for specific types.

For example, every time an entity is encountered you can generate a data model report for an entity. If that entity is encountered while generating a business report for corporate management, you might want to run a different data modeling report, one that only gives high-level details (Alternate Reports tab).