When setting up a new project it is very likely that you will have a number of users who need the same access and privileges. Copying a user’s role you have set up for one user to use as a template is the easiest way to do this.
Create the first user and set up all their privileges. Save this user.
Choose ‘Save Role…” to create a template from this current user
Use ‘New…‘ to create a new user and give them a unique name.
Use ‘Select Role… ‘ to choose the role saved in the previous steps, choose how much of the template you want to apply.
Copy a User Role
Read the help for further information on setting up users, and roles.
When running a basic item query all items of that type that the user is allowed to see are returned. As a project grows this number may become quite large, it therefore becomes necessary to add additional filtering criteria, such as the date. Querying on dates allows you to filter by the modification or creation date of an item.
Querying on Dates
Relative and Absolute Dates
You may have a good enough memory to remember it is the item you created on the 24th that you want to return. Choosing ‘Specify:‘ from the drop-down will enable a date picker. However, it is much more likely that you’ll want a range of dates, as you want to run a query each Thursday to find the new ‘issues’ raised in the last week. Relative dates allow you to do this, choosing ‘Start of last week’ and ‘Today‘ would give the data required. The benefit of the relative date specification is that the query can be saved. It can then be run next week to give a new set of values.
Specific Dates
An item’s creation or modification date may not be something that you can directly control. It certainly can not be set in the future. If a data entry clerk enters all emails as items on a Friday they’ll all have the same creation date. Equally updates will change the modification date making an old item appear more recent. Categories can be set to hold abstract data of type Date, this would allow a value such as “Review Date” to be set, and then queried upon. This data is based on a user input value and not the automatic dates recorded by Cradle.
Availability
This filtering functionality is available wherever queries can be run. This includes WorkBench, Web Access, C_IO command line tool and the Cradle API.
When you have items to review in Cradle you are presented with a list. Your review process is meant to be more than just a tick box exercise. You’ll want to see the item to review. Selecting an item from the list will give a summary of the current review status in the bottom of the dialog. Clicking the ‘View’ button will open the item in a form so its full details can be seen.
Open a Review Item
Approve or Reject
The next stage is to Approve or Reject the item. When the ‘Approve’ or ‘Reject’ buttons are pressed users are given an option to add a review comment. Your project can also be set to enforce comments, see Mandatory Comments in the project Miscellaneous section. If there are a number of reviewers, and possibly a review acceptance meeting, it is possible to change this decision up to the point that the item is Registered. That means there is no problem if you initially reject something, but after clarification need to alter your decision to approve, or visa-versa.
More Detailed Comments
Whilst each Cradle item is ideally fairly atomic, a requirement that says ‘shall do this and this and this’, is much harder to verify or alter, some can be quite complex. A single comment as a reason to reject an item may not be enough, it may also be that you would welcome further debate from the other reviewers. Discussions can be used to add annotations to an item and can build a conversation trail.
At some points in a project’s lifecycle, a large number of items need to be submitted. These may be too numerous to ‘select‘ and ‘Submit‘, Cradle offers ‘Submit by Query‘ option. This allows submission of all the items (subject to access rights) that match a query to be moved to the review stage in the configuration management system.
Submit Items
Check Before Submission
Using the ‘Show Items’ button allows the user to run a report that will detail which items the current settings will submit. In this way users can ensure that the correct items are going to be processed before creating all the approval records and changing the status of the items being submitted to that of ‘Under Review‘. For further information see the article How to Submit Items for Review Based on a Query. Also see further information on Cradle’s Configuration Management System in this article.. Configuration Management features are also available in Web Access.
Sometimes when you have been working away running queries, opening items, you just want to close everything. Start with a blank screen, clear mind, and start again.
So first go and have a cup of tea! Then either, open the Window menu, or use the arrow on the frame border menu. From there you have a couple of options, one to ‘Close All Tabs‘ The other to ‘Close Everything‘.
The first will close the tabs within the current pane, the second will return you to a clear WorkBench.
You can reach 3SL in a number of ways on social media. We want it to be as easy as possible to contact 3SL on social media, so we have a number of ways you can follow and stay up to date with what’s going on. These social media sites compliment the direct contact available through website blog and webinars, email and phone for direct communication.
LinkedIn
Our company page on Linked in is 3SL. To follow Requirements Mangement and Systems Engineering discussions along with more in depth 3SL or Cradle articles Join the “Cradle -RM/SE Tool from 3SL“ group.
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Follow @threesl on Twitter for hints tips and daily news.
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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.
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.
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
If you need to create a text ‘link’ or ‘URL’ to enable directly starting Cradle WorkBench or WebAccess and opening a particular item you can. The link shared, say by being pasted into an email or a Microsoft® Word document.
Creating the Uniform Resource Locator
This can be done from the item itself within WorkBench. Use the ‘Cradle URL’ button on the Tools menu on the ribbon, or on the command line with the c_url utility.
Cradle URL
You have an option to create a URL to open in WorkBench or Web Access. You can optionally include the username that you want to use to connect.
A URI scheme defines the structure of your Uniform Resource Locator.
This gives a few more options on how the link will behave. For an item you can specify the ‘Form’ for a Query you can specify the ‘View’
Open your URL
Copying and pasting the created link into a browser, will launch the appropriate application. If opening a WorkBench URL you may need to ‘Allow’ your browser to open it. If given the option you may need to select the file ? rather than the search ? option. Then enter your login details.
Et Voilà!
Cradle WorkBench or WebAccess will be displaying your query or item.
