• Doclets are individual pieces of a report that can be assigned out to authors to provide the content.

• Optional: Supplemental doclets are managed exactly the same way as a doclet, with respect to workflow and content management, except that the content of the files is not merged into the report package.

• Reference Doclets are managed exactly the same way as a doclet, with respect to workflow and content management, except that the content of the files is not merged into the report package.

• Sections help group and organize doclets in a report package.

• Development phases enable you to select which of three phases you require for your development: an author, review, and sign off phase.

Doclets

A core feature of report packages is the ability to break down a report into subcomponents called doclets. What makes up a doclet varies, depending on the type of report that you are creating. For example, a sales report might have separate doclets for each geographical region, and a financial disclosure might have doclets for each of the various financial statements, tax statements, and notes.

Alternatively, if one person is responsible for all of the income statement information in a report, for example, those income statement documents can be all classified as a single doclet. How you define a doclet is completely up to you. See "Identifying Doclets" in Report Package Design Considerations.

After you identify the doclets in a report, you assign them to authors, who provide content. For example, in a report that breaks down revenue by categories, you can have doclets for services, hardware, and software licenses. Then, you could assign each doclet to the management team in charge of that category.

Supplemental Doclets

Supplemental documents such as procedures, instructions, reference material, and so on, can be uploaded into a report package as a supplemental doclet. Supplemental documents can be any type of document file (for example, PDF, Excel, Word, and so on). As the content for supplemental doclets is not included within the merged report, these doclets are excluded from the review and sign off processes. The supplemental doclet contents cannot be viewed online, but users can download and use native programs to open the supplemental doclet in the same way that you can work with third party artifacts in the library.

See this video also Managing Supplemental Doclets in Narrative Reporting.

Reference Doclets

A Reference doclet can be used as a container to store contents such as named ranges from an Excel file or charts and graphs created from Reports, see Adding a Report to a Reference Doclet and consumed by one or more regular doclets (non-supplemental).

The file content for Reference doclets is not directly included in any report package outputs, such as preview, publish, review instances or signoff instances. However, embedded content within a consuming doclet is displayed as part of the report package outputs - even though the actual reference doclet is not directly merged in the outputs. Reference doclets can participate in the author phase, but not in the review or signoff phases.

Sections

Sections enable you to group doclets for organization, or to keep doclets together that have a common format or are intended for a common viewership. For example, you can group all financial statements in a financial disclosure report into one section. Doing so provides a filtered view of only those doclets to the reviewers assigned to that section.

Development Phases

Report package development occurs in three phases:

• Author phase—Compile the various report content and supporting details together into a cohesive report package.

• Review phase—Gather commentary on multiple draft versions and revise the report content accordingly.

• Sign Off phase—Gather electronic signatures from key constituents and secure report contents to prevent modifications.

You decide which development phases your report requires. If the report content is going to be provided primarily by one or two people, then you may not need an author phase. If your report is being developed for a small group of internal stakeholders and not a public audience, then you may not need a review phase. You can tailor the development phases to the type of report that you need. See "Determining Development Phases" in Report Package Design Considerations.

Lets’s look at these development phases in a little more detail.