Celebrate the forward vision of Roddenberry of a collaborative World where we all work together to keep the peace.
The 3SL Enterprise
OK to celebrate so you could just go and watch all the episodes of Trek, or you could think about the future…
Let your projects live long and prosper. Boldly go into the known with #3SL Enterprise the full muti-user version of Cradle. Don’t leave things to chance, plan your requirements and link with your designs to ensure a fully traceable deliverable system.
This blog will help explain what RTF frames are and how they are used within Cradle.
Rich Text Format can be used to enhance the data shown in Cradle. This is displayed in a Rich Text Frame. Whether this is to allow BOLD, Underline or a different Font. Generally requirements and specifications should be broken down into atomic components. The ‘detail’ should be expressed in a short and concise statement or paragraph. However, higher level requirement or tables are often useful and in these cases the emphasis / layout provided by RTF is desired.
RTF Frame Display
To create the RTF Frame, open WorkBench and navigate to Project Setup. Inside Project Setup from the Options dropdown menu select “Item Definitions” and open the tab Frame Types.
In most cases using the shipped schemas, you’ll see a frame of type RTF, however, the steps to create a frame are: Select New… this will open the “New Frame Type” dialog in which you can give your frame any name, for this I have named mine the “Blog RTF“, You will now see the Frame you have created in the list, select Edit… in this dialog you now have several settings, the “Base Type” will allow you to change the Frame Type, you will want to change this to “RTF“. Other options are available such as being able to restrict the RTF Frame by choosing a Required Skill, provided that you have a set of predefined skills in your project schema.
Now to assign this frame to an Item Type, first you will want to open “Item Types“. Select your item of choice, for this I have selected System Note – Feature. Select “Frames…” and give this a sensible name such as “RTF“.
Question: I have images that need to go into a document and want to have captions with them when published, how do I do this?
Create a Frame in WorkBench
To have captions for images without using RTF frames, add a new frame, name it the same as your image frame with the TITLE appended to it e.g. PICTURETITLE or PICTURE_TITLE. Leave this frame as a plain text frame.
Adding a text frame to use as the caption for an image
Run or open and item with the image you wish to set a caption for. Then enter the caption for the image in this new text frame.
PICTURETITLE frame for the captions
Set the Options for Captions in Document Publisher
Open your template in Document Publisher and open the Option UI. Select the ‘Figures and Tables’ tab and enter the name of this frame in the box for ‘Title frame’.
Figures and Tables tab in Options
If using a default Paragraph Group tag without Field tags then a user can add the PICTURE frame name to the ‘Frames to publish after TEXT and NOTES in the default layout’ under the ‘Item Frames’ tab.
Item Frames Tab in Options
This will then output the default layout including the frames from the ‘Frames to publish after TEXT and NOTES in the default layout’ option. The text in the PICTURETITLE frame is used for the caption for each image. The captions then for each image will then be entered into the List of Figures during publishing.
List of Figures for both default and field tag outputAn image using the title frame for the caption via the default layout
Using Field Tags
If the user wishes to use Field tags the option will work with these too. Add the field tag for the image in this case the PICTURE frame. As the template is published, the caption for the image is set from the PICTURETITLE frame. Again this will be picked up in the List of Figures when published.
Using Field tags in a Paragraph Group tag to output images with captions
Using the PICTURE frameField tags will also work within a Table or an Inserted Table. It will output the caption with the image and add it to the List of Figures when published.
Using Captions for images within a TableList of Figures Including the tags in a Table
For more information on Document Publisherclick here
In Cradle it is very simple to see multiple queries!
First of all run your selected Query and this will open in a pane as usual such as shown below:
Pane 1 – Query Feature
Now in the Top Right of the Pane you will see a little Arrow pointing right, if you select this you will be able to “Split Top/Bottom” or Split Left/Right” Creating a new pane. In that pane right click and you will have the option to “New Query…” This can be done multiple times. Showing multiple queries in views, multiple items in forms or multiple diagrams As you can see by my example below I have 3 Queries open all with different views and styles.
Multiple Queries
For further information on Multiple Queries click here
Remember Personal Communication – Letter Writing Day.
In these days of mass communication, where one ‘letter’ is emailed to hundreds of recipients or a comment is Tweeted (is that really a verb) to gazillions, it is still really personal to write.
Think how much nicer a Birthday card on the shelf is, (was going to say mantelpiece but in modern underfloor heated super insulated homes there probably isn’t a fireplace), compared to a e-Post “Hiya”. It shows someone has put time and thought into writing to you personally.
We are as guilty as the next, in not sending individual letters to all our customers. Instead we ask you to sign up to our newsletter and then write to you once a month. You’ll find our newsletter easier to read than if we had to hand write it out thousands of times!
So think of a friend or a loved one. Find some paper and a pen and jot them a note, send them a post card, or draw them a doodle.
If you’ve not got enough time, then you could just print out the following, sign and send it. You’ll need an envelope and a stamp……
Changing an item may impact related items. For example, changing a stakeholder requirement may necessitate changes to the system requirements linked to it, cascading the change to the product configuration items.
Item integrity shows items that are ‘suspect’
Items are classed as suspect when an item changes after a link was made:
As the ‘from’ item has been modified the ‘to’ item becomes suspect
Cradle provides three methods of showing items that are suspect which can be set/chosen in Preferences, these methods are:
Off
Suspect
Suspect due to my changes
Item integrity options in Preferences
If you enable Suspect or Suspect due to my changes in preferences, suspect items will be shown in red.
Confirming Integrity
Once you have reviewed the item suspect item there are two courses of action. One to change the item to comply with the changes ‘further up the hierarchy’, or just to confirm there are no changes needed. Integrity can be confirmed by a user-with read-write access, confirming integrity is recorded in the item’s change history.
Confirm item integrity
You also have the option to view suspect item in WebAccess you have to choose your method in options but items will be highlighted in red in queries if they are classed as suspect.
Enabling suspect integrity in WebAccess
Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Moved image and give example of when an item would become suspect
If, during an install, you receive the error ‘api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing’ this is due to Microsoft® Windows updates not being applied. To fix this you need to:
Install Windows updates by:
Go to Start > Control Panel > Windows Updates
Check for updates
Install all available updates
After the updates are installed, restart your computer
After the restart repeat the steps above again until no more updates are available
Once ALL Windows updates have been installed, download the Visual V++ Re-distributable
For Windows 64-bit: Visual C++ Re-distributable for Visual Studio 2015 (64-bit)
For Windows 32-bit: Visual C++ Re-distributable for Visual Studio 2015 (32-bit)
Run the vcredist_x64.exe (64-bit) or vcredist_x86.exe (32-bit) and select Uninstall
Did you know you can Colour Code your Frames to match the Priority you have set in Categories?
To enable this colour code you will need to navigate to Project Setup, inside here go to Item Definitions – Categories. For my example I have used Req Priority, in my Category Values I have :
URGENT – Red
MEDIUM – Orange
LOWEST – Yellow
TBD – Blue
Single Value Category Setup
Ensure you have assigned this Category to a Frame in an Item Type. For my example I have put mine into Item Type – Requirements and the Frame is TEXT
As you can see in my example, whenever I change my Req Priority the text colour changes in “Detailed Description” Frame.
For further information regarding Frames click here
Did you know it was really a thing? Well, apparently it is. (Search for Race Your Mouse Round the Icons Day, or visit Days Of The Year). It’s celebrated on the 28th August.
Here in England, Northern Ireland and Wales it is a bank holiday, so this is something you can ;
try at home if it is raining (it is a English bank holiday after all)
you have to be in work in case someone contacts you, but nobody does because it is a bank holiday
do if you’re in work, with IT that is less than responsive, and you want something to amuse yourself while the application loads.
Screen Background
Try downloading this background and arranging your icons. (click the small image to open a full size version and then right click and save as background)
Screen icon race track
If you need to contact 3SL during the bank holiday, please use your local distributors, or send an email to support@threesl.com and we’ll pick it up on Tuesday 29th.
If you require only some users to be able to make a change to a category or categories, then you can use a skill to stop other users from accessing it but they will still be able to see the options set.
Setting the skill on a category
In Project Setup, select the Item Type the category is set for. With the Assign Categories dialog open, select the category you wish to restrict. There is a ‘Required skill:’ option which can be set differently for each category in each item type. This means that a category can be used Requirements and SYSTEM REQs but have different skills for each item type and so can be altered by different users.
Setting a skill for a category to restrict access
Once Project Setup is Saved and Closed any users that now login, that do not have the required, will be able to see the option set but not alter it.
Using the DEMO project as an example, I set the category skill for Req Priority to REQUIREMENT. The ADMIN user does not have the REQUIREMENT skill and so once set, is able to see the as option set but not able to alter it.
No access for this user
When logged in as REQMAN who does have the REQUIREMENT skill, they can see and alter the category option.
User has access
This restriction works throughout WorkBench including in queries, forms and Item Properties.
