When working in large teams or over a long period an item’s edit history is very useful.
Each item type can have history turned on in the Project Schema via the Project Setup dialog. Users can choose what stage to enable history, Never, Always, Changing draft items that have a baselined instance, Named category matches specified value.
Right clicking on the item and selecting the History -> View Item History. The resulting dialog shows who changed the item on what date and what time. It also displays a comment (This can be made mandatory) entered at the time of editing. If an entry is selected in this list, full details are shown in the lower half of the dialog. If there are a large number of changes, the filter at the top of the dialog can aid finding a relevant change.
Item’s Edit History
Item History in a Web Browser
Web Access allows you to see an item’s history too. This functionality is in our shipped web UIs. It can be added to your own custom UIs, see the ‘history’ template information.
Since our last update spring has sprung. Once you have got used to losing that valuable extra hour sleep, as day light saving kicked in, it’s traditionally time to think out with the old and in with the new.
Consider a spring clean, remove all those stacks of dusty files full of project requirements version 1 to version 9.
Why Are You Keeping Them?
Will you really be able to find what you are looking for without a way of searching? Consider whether you can sensibly access the details of those designs sitting rolled up in mailing tubes. Do you have the means to edit them electronically any more. Does anyone know where the file is kept?
A New Way Forward
Convert projects you want to keep by inputting them into Cradle. Either by loading the documents through Document Loader or scanning old paper copies. Once scanned they could be stored as an image in an appropriate item type, or stored as a file reference within the Cradle item or an external URL within a form. Now you have a way of searching through your project data, following the links between items and possibly retiring items / standards / tests that are not longer applicable.
Create A Published Copy
For those poor souls with no copy of Cradle that they may need access to, you can publish a copy to your Intranet, or print a full report through Document Publisher (Just don’t be tempted to print it out hard copy as that’ll defeat the object of the spring clean!).
PS: We’re quite happy for those of you in the Southern hemisphere to have an Autumn Tidy instead !
Cradle Around the Globe
Great to see out Brazilian Partner OPENCADD hosting a MBSE event for the Automotive sector. Well done all.
Social Media
Twitter
Anyone looked into the mystery of a @verified Twitter account, we’d be interested to hear? We note that there are a mixture of verified and non-verified users amongst our customers. We can assure you that @threesl , is our genuine account, even if Twitter will take a bit more convincing. If you’re not a Tweeter, on LinkedIn or Facebook, you can reach us on Google if you sign in with Google+
YouTube Learning
Thanks for those who responded last month to requests for new ‘How Tos’ for our YouTube channel. If you didn’t get a chance to reply, here’s the link again ’How To’ ideas.
“Faster and Better Performance”
No, it’s not an advert for a new sports car or for the latest 2017 regulation changes that may ‘increase performance’ in F1 races. You can even put your screwdriver and spanners away. These tweaks to Cradle will help ensure it is in tip top condition and you won’t need an oily rag to do them.
1. Check the time between clients and the server. In the ‘Help’ tab, select ‘About WorkBench’ and ‘Resources’. Look for the ‘average roundtrip time’ line. If the CDS is in your local network, it should be <2 msec. If you connect over a VPN, it should be <25 msec. If longer, you may have a network problem.
2. Consider turning off the user preference ‘Refresh items when modifying links’. In the ‘Home’ tab, click ‘Preferences’, then ‘UI Control’.
3. Consider turning off ‘indicate linked items in trees’ in the same group of preferences.
4. Consider enabling caching of top-level items in Project sidebar, reduces time to find top-level items, in UI Control -> Sidebar preferences.
5. Note that when links are created, modified or deleted, the change histories are updated for items at both ends of the link.
6. Changes to links to/from items could raise alerts to be sent as and possibly sent to large numbers of users.
7. Run the cross reference and item integrity checks in the ‘Project’ tab to find and fix any problems. Issues can arise from ‘unvalidated’ imports of data or links.
8. Ensure that message compression and server-side processing are both active. Look in ‘CDS Settings’ in the preferences for any user. Checkboxes may be greyed out (can only be set on the server), but its set/not set value is accurate.
9. Large numbers of unread alerts will slow Cradle down at login and logout. Check options in the ‘Alerts’ section of the schema, from ‘Project Setup’ in the ‘Project’ tab. Use ‘Delete alerts’ in this tab to remove current user’s alerts.
10. Read the performance section in the System Administration manual
Hints of the Month
Here are some links to helpful topics since our last newsletter, they should improve your Cradle experience:
Whether it’s Daylight Saving or Cross border timezones, you can set your preferences within Cradle described in this Set Display Time Zone.
If you import data from other sources in CSV or TSV or from Excel, you may have wondered what the difference is between the different import options. What will get overwritten, what will remain? You can read an overview and example in this blog article.
You can read Hints & Tips on New Cradle-7.2 Features in the 3SL Blog.
If you need to provide information about your Cradle Database Server CDS status to 3SL support you can generate a report from within WorkBench.
If asked to provide information about your current client or server installation, this can be obtained through the ‘About’ button. The resulting screen gives a lot of information about the running system. Additional information for the current ‘Resources’ being consumed by the client or ‘CDS status’ are produced with the buttons at the bottom of the dialog.
CDS status report
Cradle the Requirements Management and Systems Engineering tool of choice provides full support* to all our Enterprise customers under their maintenance agreement.
Produce documents from your Cradle data, launched straight from WorkBench.
Document Publisher is an automated document output tool that interacts with Microsoft® Word. It is used to produce professional high-quality reports from the information held in a Cradle project database (PDB).
Document Publisher works by combining a user-defined template with information held in your project to generate dynamic content including, hierarchical headings, paragraphs of body text, tables, diagrams, figures and embedded data.
Full control is provided for paragraph styles, section numbering and captions.
Powerful data filters and parametrics can be defined to supplement database querying. Conditions under which particular attributes are to appear in the output can also be specified.
Document Publisher can be launched directly from start menu, or from within Cradle WorkBench.
We recently released an update to our website in which all pages have a new navigation bar that contains shortcut icons to move directly to the most popular areas in the site. We also improved the speed with which the website loads, so the main page should now load in one third the time that it used to take.
Most significantly, we have added a ‘Reference’ section that wil contain a range of background systems engineering information, not necessarily related to Cradle. We have begun the reference section with a large volume of basic MBSE (model based systems engineering) information, see here:
in which you will find detailed descriptions of all of the diagram types for the three groups of modelling notations supported by Cradle:
– SysML – Functional, Architecture, Data, which includes ADARTS, eFFBD, IDEF, SASD (DFD, STD, ERD and so on), architecture (PAD and AID), and many others – UML
Please tell us what you think of the information in this section, and also try our website from your smartphone! We value your feedback!
The CradleWorkBench UI screen is divided into panes, tabs. Tabs can hold a variety of data, items in forms, queries as views, diagrams and so on. When you subsequently create more data (say opening an item from the project sidebar) WorkBench will heuristically attempt to find the most appropriate pane to place the item in. For example if there is a query in one pane and an item in another, opening another item should place it with the other item.
Panes
The main sub division of the screen is a pane. Each pane is a region that can contain one or more tabs.
Tabs
Each pane is a region that can contain one or more tabs. A tab is a container with a selectable name and a rectangular area that contains the results of running a query, report, metric or graph, or a single item that is being edited.
Tabs behind Tabs?
If you’ve run a couple of queries and opened a couple of items they will each be in a separate tab. Arranging the screenpanes and tabs is the answer. If you want to see those tabs side by side you can split the screen horizontally or vertically to arrange the screen panes. You can then drag and drop the tabs into these new panes.
Split Pane Top / Bottom
There are other UI (User Interface ) commands that allow you to Maximize and Restore the tab from the same menu.
Sessions
Sessions option in Login dialog
You can design your Cradle UI with a set of panes grouped in nested rows and columns in your preferred layout. This layout is called asession. Using sessions is the easiest way to maximise your productivity with Cradle.
Article Updated 17-23/07/2018 – Working with panes, Working With Tabs, Using Sessions
Yes you can customise the front end UI shown to users. The simplest way to customise most used commands, is add them to a Start Page. The example below places a company logo, and the three most used queries on the start page. These are considered the most used actions by the company and therefore, they want them easily accessible when the tool starts. The links are customised to run the specific queries needed most.
Additionally an “Admin” section has been added to get at the User Preferences and Project Schema Setup. This could normally be shown collapsed or ‘rolled up’ as this is less frequently used.
Customised Start Page
This is the most basic of examples, set so everyone in the project sees the same page when they start up. However, in large teams, start pages can be customised to the Cradle user, personal, team or user type. The selection of page is set in the User Preferences.
Project Phases
In an enterprise environment the company process may be more tightly defined. Customisation of the flow through the project lifecycle would be better represented as groups of actions in the Phase sidebar.
Cradle 7.4 Start Page Enhancement
It is now possible to copy panels and entries and to refresh your list of queries.
When you insert an entry into a start page, the newly created entry is created beneath the selected one, rather than at the bottom of the list. You also have the option to copy start page panels and start page entries.
When creating start pages, it is possible to add queries. If you found there was a query missing that you needed, and you or a colleague created it, it is not automatically added to the cached list in the start page setup. Clicking the Refresh icon will now relist all the available queries.
It is easy to see who, using what, where from the Users report in Project Manager. This details the host system user name, their Cradle login name and the project they are connected to.
Why is there an Executing Client and Display Client shown?
These would show different values if your system is set to have the executable running on one machine with the UI redirected to another. For example a Windows® user may remotely log on to a Linux® machine, and start WorkBench, viewing the output on a Windows X terminal emulation. The machine running the Cradle Database Server may be a third machine.
User Report
Additional brief information detailing which module licences they currently have in use is also given. For full details on the licence usage users would run the Licence Usage report.
