Month: February 2017

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

A Picture…

A proverb, a newspaper editor’s comment on journalism, a printer’s marketing spiel, the origin as discussed in Wikipedia and throughout the web is a little muddied. However, we think you’ll agree that a picture can convey very quickly what you would need many paragraphs to say.

There are many uses of images and pictures in capture, design and development. From the customer’s point of view this may be the easiest way to communicate what they want, even if they don’t know the language of the supplier. The designer drawing a picture of how the system operates is creating a model that communicates more than the specifications of each part. Images of anything from an oscilloscope trace to a microscope slide may be used as evidence of meeting a requirement. Photos of the final implementation can be a fabulous selling point.

Pictures in Cradle

Cradle Workbench
Cradle Workbench

Each of these elements can be captured in Cradle throughout the lifecycle of a product.
Here a requirement, capturing a photo of the location for the installation, provides the user with the textual description (Latitude and Longitude) and a clear visualisation of the site.

The model itself, and pictorial annotations within, can illustrate the design. The design model itself is supported through numerous notations including (to name but a few):

  • Holistically viewed with SysML (Systems Modelling Language) notations.

    SysML Disgrams
    SysML Disgrams
  • Behaviourally described along a timeline with eFFBD (Extended Functional Flow Block Diagram)
  • Described in OO (Object-Oriented) methods with Use Case Diagrams describing how the system sits in its environment with CPDs (Component Diagrams) describing the parts
  • Functionally modelled through Yourdon DFDs (Data Flow Diagrams) and STDs (State Transition Diagrams) etc.

    Pictures inserted in a Data Flow Diagram
    Pictures inserted in a Data Flow Diagram

A copy of a test certificate can be stored in a compliance item type, linked back through the design to the requirement. These could then be printed as an HTML report or more formally as figures within a Document Publisher output.

Images included in View, Form and Printed output
Images included in View, Form and Printed output

From concept to creation, you, Cradle and 3SL!

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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
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Add a Document Attribute to Items

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

This is easy to set up. You simply add one or more new document ‘frame’ attribute(s) to the type of item in which you want to store documents, 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: document
6. Set the new attribute’s frame type to be WORD (DOCX) or OO WRITER that are provided with all Cradle systems. With no frame type, the frame stores plain text.
7. Select ‘OK’ to close the schema

Now any/all items of your chosen item type can have a document frame that can contain a Word document (for WORD (DOCX) frames) or a LibreOffice/Open Office document (for OO WRITER frames). The entire document is embedded inside the item’s attribute.

When you view the attribute, it will appear as <DATA>. If you select View or Edit for this attribute, then it will open in Word or Writer. If you chose Edit, then any changes that you made to the document will be saved back into the database.

You can capture tables or images or ranges of text from external Word documents into the attribute using Document Loader. You can include these Word documents in reports and in documents published by Document Publisher. If you edit the document, then the change history will store the documents from before and after each edit.

Add a Document Attribute to Items

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Increased image size to make it readable
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Opening an External URL reference from a Form

Referenced Information

Sometimes you need to reference an external resource from an item. These external references can be easily achieved by adding  a URL frame to a Cradle item type. Each instance of that item type can then hold a reference to an external resource. The URL can then be opened to view it from the link element in the form.

Creating a URL Frame

While the ability to reference external resources via URL in a form is useful, you must first assign the HTML frame type to your Item Type(s).

It is very easy to do this, simply open Project Setup > Go to Item Types > Select your desired Item Type and click “Frames”. From here, create a new frame and then from the Type drop down select “HTML”.

Screenshot showing how to assign a frame
Assigning a Frame

We hope you find this useful! For information on other useful frame types see this cradle help article.

Article Updated 30/01/2019 – Added extra information

 

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Avoid Problems Opening Source Documents and Statements

Avoid Problems Opening Source Documents and Statements

You can capture information from Word documents into items in a Cradle database. The items are linked to the ‘source statements’ inside the document. You can follow a link from the item to the paragraph, table, or table row or cell that is the origin of the requirement. When you do this, Word will open to show the source document, correctly positioned to show the source statement.

If you see an error about a command, such as EditGoTo not being available as the document is read-only, then you need to clear the ‘open e-mail attachments read-only’ setting in Word, as shown in the figure.

We hope that this helps!

Avoid Problems Opening Statements
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Contents of a Cradle database

Each Cradle database contains different sets of information. These can be imagined as layers, where each layer uses the data in the layers below it. For example, cross references cannot exist until the items exist whose relationships are shown by the cross reference. These layers are, highest to lowest:

1. Cross references – the links between the data
2. Items – the data
3. Definitions – how to find, view and report the data
4. User profiles – who can own and access the data
5. Schema – the structure of the data
Cradle database layers
You can export/import each layer individually, or in any combination, or all layers. You should only import a layer of information if the lower layers already exist in the database (unless you know that it is safe).

To initialise a new database from an existing database, you need as a minimum:

– The schema
– Definitions

User profiles are needed to use a database and may be needed for some parts of the schema (such as workflows and alerts) and definitions (user and personal scopes).

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Single User to Enterprise Conversion

Project Grown?

Has your project grown? Is it too big for a single user? Do you need to work in an enterprise environment?

When you first start with a project you may just need one person working away at the initial Requirements (single-user environment). However, when more stakeholders, designers, reviewers and managers join (an enterprise environment) the installation needs to grow.

The good news is that in Cradle this is simply a reconfiguration of your Cradle licence for an Enterprise version and then you can all carry on with the same project.