re:ality elements is a new approach to separating data content from it's style and presentation. It aims to simplify the transmission of business data and streamline the manipulation of that data into a format suitable for presentation. The re:ality elements data model describes data in terms of data sets and dictionaries. A data set consists of tabular data using the familiar concepts of rows, columns and cells. A dictionary consists of data in the form of key-value pairs. Data sets may be grouped together to create nested data structures that describe hierarchical relationships. The re:ality elements data model is intended to be an interchangeable format with built-in import support for XML and Microsoft Excel.

In order to map incoming re:ality elements data into an re:ality markup language (RML) document, a template must first be created using Apache Jelly. Jelly is an XML based scripting and processing engine that offers an efficient means to describe complex data manipulation and formatting. Jelly is explained in further detail at: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/jelly/. The Jelly scripting engine is fully integrated in the re:serve job loading framework allowing uploaded data to be flowed into existing templates stored on our servers. In addition to the standard Jelly libraries, we offer our own custom tag library designed to aid in the manipulation of re:ality elements data structures.

In conjunction with RML and Jelly template scripts, re:ality elements forms a powerful model-view-controller (MVC) architecture for automated publishing. re:ality elements defines the data model, Jelly provides the controller and RML describes the final view. The goal of this approach is to normalise the content stream and standardise the method of data procurement and delivery. The separation of content from style and layout introduces an added layer of flexibility and promotes the reuse of existing resources. By creating the distinction between style and content, it becomes possible to effect radical changes to the visual layout and formatting of a document with little effort. The MVC model also allows brand new documents to be developed by simply changing the data source whilst retaining the style and formatting rules from an existing template. Another benefit of this methodology is that it offers a clear division of responsibilities for teams working on automated publishing projects. The preparation of data can take place independently of the production of a design and the programming of a template. Likewise in a production environment, data content can be managed and maintained independently of tweaks to the visual look and feel.