If you frequently run the same item commands, or you want to guide users to use a particular subset of commands, add them to the Cradle ‘View’. These are termed “View commands”.
When defining a Cradle Views, you can add commands to appear at the ‘Item icon’. When the view is run this enables different users to be guided to commands for their role in the project. Combined with a phase and they can, run the appropriate query and they can get straight into creating children, linked items, updating link details, or whatever is appropriate for their role. Spending a little while now, arranging the process steps for your users can give a significant gain in productivity.
Want to ship a read-only copy of your project to a Customer or Supplier?
Web Publisher Output
Use Web Publisher to create a hyper-linked output of your project. This can be copied onto a pen-drive, CD, Intranet and sent to your customer. They don’t have to have Cradle to see your work on the project, just an html browser. Of course we would suggest that they get a copy of Cradle for themselves and then they load the project items and query, publish, alter and necessary, but we know that’s not always practicable.
You can limit what an end user will see by selecting various options. This could be either one item type or All the items types within the project. You can then give the hyper-linked project an owner and select a location of where the files are to be sent.
If you require any more information on Web Publisher then you can find this within our Cradle help. Please click the link.
Article updated 05/12/2018 – Added information about restricting items published
Having developed a schema, added item types, defined workflows, tailored categories to your process, a new project starts. The last thing you want to do is start from scratch defining the it all over again.
Solution
If you have a really useful setup that you want to reuse in a new project then simply “drag’n’drop” it in Project Manager. Log into the projects with a user with privilege to import project settings and then drag the schema from the developed project to your new project. The alternative would be to export just the project schema from your original project and then import it into the new project. Whatever you do, you don’t need to start typing and clicking to create a new project setup.
Copy a Project Schema
Reporting on a Project Schema
Schema Report Details
In order to see the Project Schema in a tabular form, log into the project from Project Manager and simply select the Schema in the tree. Pressing the Publish button will output this as a report. If you want finder granularity of what shows in the report open WorkBench and run the Standard Report “Project Schema” from the Publish->Reports tab.
Your chosen Cradle ‘Form’ or ‘View’ is not showing the item category you want to see. It may be that you select a different form, if one has been defined showing the item information you want. You could also select one of the automatically generated forms that contains the category or redefine the one you already have. However, this is not always possible as the user may not have the correct privileges. The CREATE_DEFS privilege is required to allow them to change it. All this may just be over the top for a quick peek at a value.
Solution
Select ‘Information’ from the ‘Item’ ribbon for a quick view of all the details for the selected item.
The Item Information dialog can be used to view categories, item attributes, dates, calculations and even the logic matches in a rule set.
Cradle Preferences: Controlling the tool to suit your needs.
“I want to see the Dashboard when I log in” Says the Manager
“I want to see the Modelling sidebar” Says the Engineer
Set everything just how you want it in Cradle. Tailor and save your individual preferences for whenever you log into any project.
User Preferences
Cradle is delivered with a set of default preference settings. These can be altered by the system administrator by editing the system configuration files. However, these preferences may not suit everyone. Two people working on the same project may legitimately have different formats for time and date as they are based in different countries. Edited user preferences are applied on top of the system settings giving two layers of control, defaults set by the installation, tweaks set by users. To read more see the Cradle help on preferences
The Quick Access Bar
The QAB (Quick Access Bar) bar at the bottom of the screen shows your most used queries. It can be configured to show the item types most relevant to you.
Diagrams
The way your diagrams look and the information shown on the screen can be tailored with Diagrams setting.
What Opens What?
By changing the details of the Applications listed in the preferences, you can control the software used to open a particular file type. If you have a favourite RTF viewer, say, that you want to use to show published queries, you can set the value here.
Application Preferences
What’s the Time Mr Wolf?
How your display show the time and date are also set by the user preferences. Internally information is held in UTC, but as a result of altering preference settings, you can show this to suit your locale.
All in an .ini
A users local preferences and the global preferences set for your company are held in configuration files. These are detailed in this article.
Everything within this post can be found within our Cradle online help, with in depth instructions and guides. You can also find other options that are available within preferences.
Article Updated 22/05/2018
Article Updated 17/09/2018 – Added links to Cradle online help
Editing dates in Cradle can be useful. You may want to change the default date format, or it could be you need to bring a review date forward for selected items. In this article I will explain how you can do this, including tips which may help.
Attributes
Cradle allows attributes to be defined as dates. These dates are stored by default using the format yyyy/mm/dd in the database. However, you can control how dates are displayed, for example as: dd/mm/yy or as mm/dd/yy. Date fields are displayed with a ‘date chooser‘ that displays a calendar that you can use to change months and select days.
If you enter a date before 2000, such as: 23/09/95 then you cannot enter a year number such as: 07 to mean 2007. Similarly, if you enter a date with a year such as 16, then this will be interpreted to be 2016 and you cannot manually enter a year such as 99 to mean 1999.
Editing Tips
Date Picker
When you select a date field, the day, month and year components of a date can be selected individually
The cursor up and cursor down fields can be used to change a day, month or year by one, moving forwards and backwards, and you can move through 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001
TAB can be used to move forward through the components of a date field
You can press CTRL-TAB to move backwards through the components of a date field
You can also use the ‘date chooser’ at any time
The ability to use the cursor keys and TAB and CTRL-TAB may be helpful.
Display Preferences
To set your choice of date display, open the User Preferences -> UI Control and select in Date and TimeDisplay.
Date Preferences
The Preferencesdialog lets you control settings that are used to customise your WorkBench environment and set default options. For more information you can take a look at this cradle help article.
If you have upgraded from Cradle-6.8 – when we had an add-in for Excel – to Cradle-7.0, then you will have seen the new, and consierably more capable, capture utility. This new capture utility is shown in a Cradle tab in the Excel ribbon.
If the old Add-Ins tab is still visible, then you can remove it. This may be part of your personal Excel setup and so is in your Windows profile and hence is not something that our installer can change.
To remove the Add-Ins tab from Excel (if you see it):
1. Start Excel 2. Right click anywhere in the ribbon and choose ‘customise ribbon’ 3. On the right hand side of the dialog, de-select the ‘Add-Ins’ tab (you can check that it is empty!) 4. Click OK
