Day: 21 February 2017

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Database Size Calculator

We have produced a simple Excel spreadsheet that automates the database sizing formulae from the ‘Database Sizing’ section of Chapter 5 – ‘Hardware Sizing’ in the Cradle System Administration Guide.

You enter estimates for:

– The number and size of the items in your database
– The number of cross references
– The number of baselines you expect to create over the lifetime of the project, and
– The amount of new and changed information in each baseline

and you will see an estimate of the size of your Cradle database at the end of the project.

You can experiment with these values to explore upper and lower bounds for the eventual database size.

If you would like a copy of this spreadsheet, leave a comment below, or send an e-mail to me at: mark.walker@threesl.com

We will include this spreadsheet in future Cradle releases.
Database Size Calculator

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Add an Image Attribute to Items

It is often helpful to be able to store image(s) inside items in a Cradle database.

This is easy to set up. You simply add one or more new image ‘frame’ attribute(s) to the type of item in which you want to store images, such as your test cases, or your System Breakdown Structure (SBS). To do this:

1. Start WorkBench and login to your database as a user with PROJECT privilege so you can change the schema
2. Select ‘Project Setup’ from the ‘Project’ tab to open the schema
3. With ‘Options’ set to ‘Item Definitions’, select the ‘Item’ type (this is the default)
4. Select the item type and select ‘Frames…’
5. Select ‘New…’ and enter the name of the new image attribute, such as: figure
6. Set the new attribute’s frame type to be an image (with no frame type, the frame stores plain text), such as GIF or JPEG (provided with all Cradle systems)
7. Select ‘OK’ to close the schema

Now any/all items of your chosen item type can have a figure frame that can contain an image. When you view the attribute, the image will appear. You can capture images from external documents into the attribute using Document Loader. You can include the images in reports and in documents published by Document Publisher. If you edit the image, then the change history will store the images from before and after each edit.

We hope that this is helpful!

Add an Image Attribute to Items
Article updated 22/10/2018 – Made image bigger
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User information

Who?

User information can be used to show such things as who has created an item, edited an item and when the item was created.

Chances are in a big project not every user will know all the other users on a project. If you need to know a bit more about who edited an item, you can hover over the changer for a tool-tip in a Cradle Form in WorkBench. This will show the additional information held for each of the users in the User Setup dialog.

To set User Profile details, this is done via “User Setup”  as you can see in the screenshot below showing the Description of the User and the Location of the user.

 

Screenshot showing User Setup dialog
User Setup

These details are then shown when hovering over the user in areas such as Forms to show when the user last modified this item.

user tooltip showing details
Show user information

When / What ?

There are many more fields that will give you additional information information, dates and times will show the full underlying UTC, categories will show their description,  go on have a hover and discover.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added extra information