The narrative document generation utilizes the
Velocity Template Engine
, an open source project which is hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. The Velocity engine enables a clean separation between the presentation and organization of content and the data being presented. As such, an array of templates may be created, each tailoring the narrative in a variety of layouts and/or styles. The templates are read by
JMP Clinical
at run-time and available for selection when creating the final document. The result of this design enables very customizable output that may be altered and/or extended as appropriate for different types of studies or specific regulatory requests.
The template language itself has a simple syntax that not only supports substituting values for variables, but additionally supports conditional logic, looping constructs, and string manipulation and arithmetic functions. Refer to the
Apache Velocity Project User Guide
for the full details of the template syntax.
Specifically for
JMP Clinical
, the narrative generation process starts by first generating a table of metadata values and a table of the adverse event data. The selected template is then merged with these data sets to produce the narrative document. The template content is a mixture of the static sentence information and snippets of substitution variables and logic for controlling which sentences are displayed, the order in which they are displayed, and which specific words/phrases/tables/etc. should make up the narrative. This enables templates to be created that support any language and still adhere to the appropriate grammar rules of that language.
Three VM files define a template: a header file, a footer file, and a content file. The content file has nothing appended to the name and this name is surfaced in the drop-down menu.. The
_Header.vm
and
_Footer.vm
suffixes
must be appended to names of the header and footer files, respectively. For example, the default template files, included with JMP Clinical, are
Default.vm
,
Default_Header.vm
, and
Default_Footer.vm
.
Template files are located at **
/user/clinical/narrativetemplates
. The default location for this path is
%APPDATA%\SAS\JMPClinical\12\JMPC\NarrativeTemplates
. Adding additional, VM template files in this path will make those templates available for the users to select when generating the
AE Narrative
report.
