On-demand LiveDoc Work Item Loading

For those not yet familiar with them, Polarion ALM's LiveDoc documents look and edit like documents in Microsoft Word™ or Google Drive™, but you can easily mark any paragraph, bullet list, or other content as a uniquely identifiable, traceable, and process-controlled Requirement, Test Case or other artifact type, with additional metadata, data properties and contextual workflow.

We invented a technology that forever solves the problem of lack of granular traceability control, the biggest reason why “standard” office documents are nightmare for any process manager. LiveDocs are Polarion Software “first”, which no other solution today can match.

Of course we recommend that customers structure their requirements properly for cleaner ownership and workflow control - the best practice is to have max 1000-2000 per document. However, there are situations when it is necessary and practical to have several thousand requirements or test cases in single document.


Polarion 2017 introduces new functionality to improve and extend scalability of LiveDoc Documents. When users open a document, the content  (including Work Items such as requirements or test cases) is loaded  on-demand as the Work Items scroll into view. This ensures that the right amount of data is loaded to the editor resulting in significant performance improvement for load, save and edit operations in large Documents with many Work Items. However, the content of the entire document is searchable, and numbering of lists and threading of comments is maintained.

Unique Experience Creates High Expectations

Polarion users have found the LiveDoc experience so natural that it has produced much higher expectations than we originally counted on. People are looking for capabilities found in desktop word processing tools, and we continually work on fulfilling their wish lists. Let's look briefly as some wishes we made come true during the 2017 cycle.

Expansion of LiveDoc keyboard shortcuts

We have enhanced the set LiveDoc keyboard shortcuts quite a lot. And rather than making you switch to some reference in Help, we now provide built-in documentation right in the Editor. The pop-up reference dialog is sensitive to the operating system you are using, so whether you use Windows, Mac or Linux you’ll see appropriate shortcuts.

Import Large MS Word Tables Into Work Items

It’s now possible to import rows from tables in Microsoft Word documents as individual Work Items in Polarion. The import configuration process is similar to that for other types of content, and you can preview the import results and make changes before finalizing the import.

Page Break Controls for Documents

When exporting to PDF or Microsoft Word, you can…

• Control Page Breaks in Document Work Items: prevent page breaks inside a single item, so the page break can can occur only between Work Items and not inside the content of Work Items.
• Control Page Breaks in Tables: prevent page breaks from occurring within a table, so the page break can happen only before or after the table. This works in both Documents and Rich Text fields of Work Items in the Tracker
  
  

List Styling

Last but not lease, and brand new for the 2017 GA release, you can now configure how hierarchical list styles are rendered in the web UI, and exported to PDF or Microsoft Word. There is a new system property that enables administrators to define styles: com.siemens.polarion.document.listStyle=1ai

Possible characters are:

• “1” for decimal numbers “1,2,3”
• “a” for lowercase letters “a,b,c”
• “A” for uppercase letters “A,B,C”
• “i” for lowercase Roman numbers “i,ii,iii”
• “I” for uppercase Roman numbers “I,II,III”

With this configuration, the hierarchical list styles will look like this: