3SL Blog (Structured Software Systems Ltd)

24th August 20174th February 2019

How do I rearrange items in a hierarchy?

Reorder Item and Their Hierarchies

Hierarchies are seldom created in a single operation. It is more usual for you to create a hierarchy interactively, gradually developing the hierarchy item-by-item. It is also very likely that the hierarchy will need to be reorganised, to reorder items as it is being built, for example:

To add a new top-level item into the hierarchy and move existing items below it
Move individual items to a different position in the hierarchy
Move sub-trees in the hierarchy upwards, downwards, or to any other new position

We term this process of rearranging – “reordering”. Cradle fully supports reordering using drag and drop.

To enable this feature:

Items must be of the same type (system notes or requirements)
Auto-numbering must be selected for the item
Items must allow hierarchical numbering using Key
CREATE_XREF and DELETE_XREF privileges needed
Set the preference “Allow drag and drop in same tree”
A navigation that sorts by Key

Why we use hierarchies

Hierarchies are useful to show the users of a project a view of the Top level item and all its branches, and with Cradle it is easy to join many hierarchies into one, you can create a new top-level item and connect hierarchies to it.

For further information on reordering please head over to our online help.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added why we use hierarchies

23rd August 201725th August 2022

Silent Installs

What is a silent install and how do I do it with Cradle?

Silent installs are installations which do not require user interaction.

To perform a silent installation you will need to create a “setup.iss” file, this is created when making your recording for the silent installation by opening the command prompt and running setup.exe -r. After completing the installation you will have the “setup.iss” file in your system drive e.g C:\Windows.

You can now perform a silent installation with your recorded settings!

On the machine you would like to do the silent installation, place your setup.iss file in the same directory as the setup.exe. For full installations or server only installs, you will also need your security code which you place within a text file such as “code.txt“. You must only enter the Security Code on the first line and add a carriage return. For client only installs the file can be blank.

Now you have your files ready, open the command prompt navigate to your setup.exe directory and enter the following setup.exe code.txt -s

You are now running your silent installation!
Remember when you have finished you will need to restart the machine.

Please note this does not work with Toolsuite

If you would like more information on this please go to Cradle Documentation – Installation Guide – Windows and to Chapter 8. Or click here for Installation Types

22nd August 201723rd August 2022

The Value of Reviews

“One of the most sincere forms of respect is listening to what another has to say”

Bryant H. McGill

Nobody likes to be told they are wrong. Nobody wants to be told they should have done something better. It’s human nature to think the best of ourselves. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not the best attitude when attempting to find the best solution to a problem. Just what is the value of reviews?

Designed by Committee

The other extreme is where we believe everyone has an equal voice regardless of the situation. Really? We’re designing a new nuclear powered rocket to reach the outer solar system and we have to ask the cleaner whether he thinks the professor in Nuclear physics has chosen the correct error margin in her calculations? There are many ways to solve a problem, any problem. But there will always be a handful of solutions that fall into the top quartile. These are usually those proposed by people with domain knowledge. So whilst committee led projects are often doomed (unless the committee is small and carefully selected), listening to core colleagues can prove invaluable. That’s not to say that we’re not going to get a number of readers now quoting a bit of “blue sky”, “out of the box”, “tangential” thinking that gave an amazing breakthrough. However, let’s look at the average case.

Tick in the Box Review

So you’re convinced, well at least your boss is, that you need to have a review. You prepare all the work, bung it in a document and then email it to everyone in the team. Comments by Monday please. (Today’s Friday and who wants to review over the weekend). Monday inbox, great only one email. Peter thinks the font is a little large. Sorted. Pass that over to the manufacturing team.

^{1 month on…}This unit is way too big. Who on earth made something like that? What could they be thinking?
“Morning Brian… Oh what’s that? Not the slider arm? Surely not that size! Why’s it made in Aluminium, that will never interface with the brass elliptical follower…. Oh, Bri’ you’ll be holding up the project”
If only the review had picked up the 10.0mm rather that 1.00mm typo. If only the reviewers had included someone on the power team……

Review and Respect

A carefully selected review team should be chosen. Not because they are your friends or underlings that will pass your review without comment, but because they have a valuable insight. They can help spot actual mistakes. They can trigger a rethink of potential problems, cost savings or synergies. They may not have the answers themselves, but listening to them can help. The value of reviews is down to respect. Of course there is little value in a tirade of semantics or formatting comments. However, if they misunderstand what is being said, and moving a comma or explicitly breaking a requirement into two makes it atomic and unambiguous, chances are your supply chain will benefit too.

Selecting an item from the to be reviewed list — Cradle Reviews

Left Shift

But reviews are expensive and waste time…

Yes, they can be a bit like an insurance policy. They may not pick up much or they may find a glaring error. If they find nothing then you have to ask whether the reviews are being done correctly. Make sure reviewers understand the need to be constructive towards the overall goal, and are not falling into the tickbox trap.

The further to the left we can move any issues the better. Why? As it is simpler and more cost effective to resolve issue in the early stages. Correctly understanding and ironing out issues in the requirements is much better than waiting until the design is complete. Thinking what can go wrong and designing round it is more cost effective than waiting until it has been made. A completed object with a commissioning problem can be a nightmare.

Now Go and Review

So put down your mop for the moment and tell us James, “Do you think 10% is a sufficient margin for extra fuel?”

21st August 201721st August 2017

Eclipse 2017

Brighten Up Your Day

Things may get dark outside for some today with the eclipse 2017. However, a real #MondayMotivation would be knowing you have the right tools for the job in the week ahead. Don’t be left in the dark, head over to 3SL and make sure you have your copy of Cradle. Be enlightened to the benefits of Requirements Management and Systems Engineering, whatever your task – Be in Control.

Cartoon of the eclipse and how 3SL could brighten your way — Eclipse 2017 Don’t be left in the Dark

For more information about Eclipse 2017on 21st August 2017, visit the NASA website site.

21st August 2017

3SL Inc. – Moves Office

Cradle’s U.S. Distributor Moves

After spending the last 7 years in a wonderful office, 3SL Inc. seized the opportunity to be a part of an exciting and growing co-working movement at Huntsville West . It is one of the newest co-working spaces in Huntsville. (See https://www.us-3sl.com/contact.html for contact details)

Bye Bye 1500 Perimeter Parkway, Hello 3001 9th Ave. Huntsville.

3SL Inc. announce their move to Huntsville West, and we (3SL) wish them all the best in their new home. We trust all their staff and all our North American customers continued success.

Screen shot of 3SL Inc home page — 3SL Inc – New Office

For all Cradle Distributors and Head Office details please see 3SL contacts page.

18th August 20174th February 2019

Managing your Cradle Environment

A Fully Customisable Systems Engineering Environment

We use definition files to define your Cradle environment to your project’s needs.

Queries – how we filter items in the database
Views – how we view the lists of filtered items
Forms – how we see individual items
Matrices – how we view results of queries and linked items in rows and columns
Metrics – how we can see the numbers of items meeting a criteria
Reports – how we output exported tables containing a set of query results formatted according to a particular view and table style.
Dashboards – management summary that can define KPIs
Navigations – how we filter cross references
Startpages – how we provide a range of selectable actions, each of which either displays a PDF file, opens a specific page in the Cradle help, opens a particular dialog or runs a query, report or similar. The start page is displayed in the main working area of the WorkBench UI and is fully customisable
Sessions – store information about your required WorkBench environment such as window dimensions, current project, opened queries, reports etc. to be loaded upon login
Graphical Print Settings – how we print diagrams
Hierarchy Diagram Properties – style in which we show items
Capture Setups – how we are to capture items in Document Loader
Report Styles – styles available for reports which include font, alignment, underline, etc.
Graph Styles -styles available for graphs which include fonts, grid size, axes size, etc.
Export Formats – settings of exports to reuse at a later time
Import Formats – settings of imports to reuse at a later time

All of the above are available in WorkBench and subsets are available in other tools, e.g. you can run queries in WebAccess or use Import Formats with c_io

For more information on how to setup these definition file please see definitions section of our online help.

These definitions are stored in one of several areas:

Project – visible to all members of the Cradle project (PROJECT privilege is required)
User Type – visible to all users with your user type in this project
Team – visible to all members of your current team in this project
User – visible only to you when logged in as this Cradle username in this project
Personal – visible to a specific machine login username, across all projects to which he/she has accesses
Automatic – visible to all members of this Cradle project (you cannot save definitions with this scope). Automatic definitions are created as a starter set when an item type is defined. They are a good starting candidate for editing and then using ‘Save As‘
System – you cannot save definitions with this scope

Managing Definitions

WorkBench provides the ability to manage your Cradle environments via:

Definitions Sidebar
Definitions Manager

Managing definitions scrrenshot — Managing definitions

These allow you to copy, move or delete definition files through the WorkBench interface.

Using these methods to manage your definitions enables you to reduce the number of stored definitions within a project by allowing users to share definitions at the team-level as opposed to users having their own copies of the same definitions.

Redundant Definitions

To reduce the amount of redundant definitions, it is possible for the user to create a User Definition opposed to creating a Project definition if it is for personal use. It is also possible to delete previous Definitions if they are no longer required.

Examples

A user could:

Move definitions from a user to that user’s team, or to the project, for everyone to use
Copy definitions from one team to another team or a member of another team
Move definitions from a user to become accessible by all users of a specific user type

Updated Article 04/02/2019 – Added info on Redundant Definitions

17th August 20175th April 2023

Using a Company Templates for Document Publisher

Company Templates

Does your company use different types of Microsoft® Word template for different types of document? Did you know that you can use those company templates inside Document Publisher?

Document Publisher has different locations you can save the files to but it can also open files from outside these locations as well. These files will then be shown as ‘local’ and can then be edited in Document Publisher. Once you are happy with the company template it can be saved to any one of the locations the user has access to within Cradle.

Loading an External Template

Select the File menu and then New, then From Existing Template and select the template type the user wishes to open. Once the Template dialog opens, click the Local... button.

This will then open explorer in which the user can then locate and open the file they require.

This will then open the file named as NewTemplate and not as the name of the file you have opened from. Once you have added at least one tag, Document Publisher will allow you to save the template.

Saving a File

The first is to select the File menu and Save, then the Template dialog opens, the user can either save it to one of the locations they can access or as below, select the Local… button and rename and save it through Explorer.

Saving templates through Explorer for Document Publisher

This will then save the file to that location and show in Document Publisher as (Local).

Showing template is saved Local — Showing the file is saved as Local and not in a Cradle Location.

This file when finished can then be saved into a Cradle location e.g. Project so it can then be published through WorkBench. To do this the user will click the File menu and then Save and when the Template dialog opens, select the Location the user requires and change the name they want the file to have.

Template Dialog using the Project Location — Saving in the Project location and new name for the file.

This will now show it is saved in the project location. This can be done to any location the user has access to.

Tempalte in project area — Template is now saved in the Project Location

To see how to Publish through WorkBench, click here

For Publishing a draft template, click here

For free Microsoft® Office templates and themes, click here

16th August 201731st January 2019

Maintaining and Repairing your Cradle Databases

Problems with your Database?

In the rare occasion that something has gone terribly wrong with you database, here are some things that you may find helpful:

Retrieving Licence Statistics

If you are finding that you are running out of licenses or you just want to have an overview of license usage over a period of time you can use c_usage which can be run to output the information from Cradle into an excel file. You then copy this date from the excel file into a spreadsheet we supply called c_usage.xls which once the data has been pasted into the spreadsheet will then update it’s other worksheets which will display the corresponding information in graphs.

For more information on how to retrieve licence statistics please see our online help.

Retrieving Specific Error Logs

All components of the Cradle software distribution include crash resistance such that, in the event of an internal error occurring within the software component, internal recovery action is taken, and the software component remains running.

In all cases, the recovery action includes adding an entry to an error log file that provides a complete description of the internal environment of the software component when the problem arose.

This log could potentially become quite large over time and you may only want retrieve one or more entries from this log, c_errlog can be used to retrieve one or more entries from the error log files produced by Cradle.

For more information on how to parse an error log file please see our online help.

Checking the Version of your Cradle PDB Files

Check the version of your database files
The c_pdbver utility allows you to determine the version of your database files, it check the filesets are compatible with a version number you specify and confirms whether or not each fileset is in the specified version.

pdb_ver result — 7.3 compatibility check

For more information on how to check the version of database files please see our online help.

Checking and Repairing Database files

If you have had a machine crash or hardware failure when Cradle was writing to the database files you may want to check and repair the database file to ensure you don’t see any further corruption to your database. We supply a utility for this called dcheck that checks and repairs damage to the ISAM files within a Cradle PDB.

For more information on how to check/repair database files please see our online help.

11th August 201710th November 2022

How do I manage my Linux Cradle server when I have no GUI?

Managing your Cradle server via Command Line

Quite often you may find that the server machine you install the CDS and CWS on may not have a graphic user interface, in this case you can manage your Cradle server via a command line

How to Install a Security Code

The c_config command allows you to update a Cradle Security Code

Format

c_config -i code

Example

c-config -i BWEr-DSWe...

How to Start/Stop/Restart the Cradle Database Servers

The c_start command allows you to start, stop, restart or test the Cradle Database Server (CDS) and/or Cradle Web Server (CWS).

Format

c_start {start | stop | restart | test} {cds | cws | all}

Example

c_start start cds

Variations

Command	Result
c_start start	start cds + cws
c_start start cds	start cds only
c_start start cws	start cws only
c_start start all	start cds + cws

c_start stop	stop cds + cws
c_start stop cds	stop cds only
c_start stop cws	stop cws only
c_start stop all	stop cds + cws

c_start restart	restart cds + cws
c_start restart cds	restart cds only
c_start restart cws	restart cws only
c_start restart all	restart cds + cws

c_start test	give process numb of cds + cws
c_start test cds	only give process numb of cds
c_start test cws	only give process numb of cws
c_start test all	give process numb of cds + cws

How to Manage Cradle Projects

The c_prj command is used to create, delete, lock and unlock Cradle projects.

Format

c_prj.exe [-create
              -code <projcode>
              -title <project title>
              -path <project location>
              [-pid <project PID>]
              [-schema <schema name>]]
          [-delete
              -code <projcode>
              -password <MANAGER password>
              [-method {all | pdb | reg_only}]]
          [-lock
              -auth <user>,<password>,<projcode>
              [-allow_user <user>]]
          [-unlock
              -auth <user>,<password>,<projcode>]

Examples

c_prj.exe -create -code TEST -title "Test Project" -path /home/apps/temp/projects/test -pid TEST01 -schema empty

Will create a project with a project code of TEST, a title of Test Project in the /home/apps/temp/projects location with a PID of TEST01 using the empty schema.

c_prj.exe -delete -code TEST -password MANAGER PASSWORD -method all

Will delete the TEST project along with the registry entry, database files and directories.

10th August 20177th October 2022

Exporting a Single Item Frame using ‘getframe’ with c_io

Exporting

A user can export a single item’s text or binary frame and place it in a file using getframe. A batch file is great for this as a user can use copy and paste the same command line numerous times, replacing the identity for each line. Then when run, all the frames will be quickly exported.

The start of this command line is the same as for all main options, using the path and login details.

The -getframe options are as follows:

Options for getframe in c_io.exe — The options for getframe in c_io.exe

-getframe option sets the frame name to be output for the first item that matches the query or identity (if used).

-file sets the name and location of the file to be output

-query option sets the query to be used

-qloc sets the location of the -query option

-identity over rides any set within the used query

c_io.exe Batch File GetFrame Examples

"%CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\windows\c_io.exe" -login admin,ADMIN,demo -getframe NOTES -file "C:\Temp\notes.txt" -query "Req - All" -qloc automatic

Using -identity

"%CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\windows\c_io.exe" -login admin,ADMIN,demo -getframe TEXT -file "C:\Temp\REQ-2_TEXT.txt" -query "Req - All" -qloc automatic  -identity "REQ-2"

"%CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\windows\c_io.exe" -login admin,ADMIN,demo -getframe PICTURE -file "C:\Temp\REQ-9_PIC.jpg" -query "Req - All" -qloc automatic  -identity "REQ-9"

Helpful other c_io options

There are several helpful options especially when using in a batch file.

-log allows a user to specify a name for a log. This is the log that will have the details of the actions performed during the import.

-noldap allows users to bypass using LDAP when running a command line or batch file.
-errorstack option is for logging any issues with the import

"%CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\windows\c_io.exe" -login admin,ADMIN,demo -export "C:\Temp\all3.exp" -type all -noldap -errorstack -log "C:\Temp\all4_log.log"

"%CRADLEHOME%\bin\exe\windows\c_io.exe" -login admin,ADMIN,demo -export "C:\Temp\pdb3.exp" -type pdb -noldap -errorstack -log "C:\Temp\pdb3_log.log" -verbose

Options not used within a batch file

There are a couple of options that are not used in a batch file. The reason is that they are only useful in a command line, in a command prompt as they show pop ups with information on them.

-ver lets the user see what the version number, date and time of the build they are using.
-help option allows a user to see the command line options.

Links to Other Batch File Options

Read Publishing a Formal Document Using a Batch File article for information of formal documentation.

Details of importing can be read in Importing Using c_io in a Batch File