From concept to creation
We are pleased to announce that we have a new partner in Australia – Agile Controls. The main point of contact is Simon Fearnley. Contact details are here:
https://www.threesl.com/contact/au.php
All of our existing customers in Australia will continue to deal directly with 3SL.
We welcome the opportunity to work with Agile Controls and to grow the use of Cradle in Australia!
If you find the defaults give you too many reviewers for your Configuration Management Process, then create a new custom Workflow in Cradle.
The number of reviewers, the steps on accept or reject, steps based on the owner can all be altered in the Project Schema. Each item type can have a different process flow or they can follow the built in defaults.
Hierarchy Diagrams (HIDs) are an excellent way to show the relationships between items in your database. The boxes in the diagrams are the items and their connecting lines are the cross references.
You can define a colour for each cross reference link type in the schema. If you do, then these colours are used to draw the cross references in HIDs.
This means that you can easily interpret the connections shown by the HID as, for example ‘has child’ or ‘is satisfied by’, or ‘allocated to’ relationships.
If you have not tried setting colours for your cross reference link types, please try it and see how this will transform the ease with which your HIDs can be interpreted!
A new update to 3SL website is available, includes updated, responsive, software downloads section here: https://www.threesl.com/downloads/software.php
Please visit and tell us what you think!
As you may know, there are many opportunities to extend Cradle’s functionality, including using external commands. These commands can be triggered from user-defined start pages, or the user-defined phase hierarchy, or when you work with attributes inside items.
Commands can be made variable using Command Directives. Some of these can access the username, password and project code of the current user.
For example, the Command Directive $LOGIN is replaced by the string -login user,pwd,pcode where username is the current user’s Cradle username, pwd is the current user’s plain text password and pcode is the project code of the database that the current user is logged-in to.
The Command Directives $CUSER, $PASS and $PROJC are available for each of these components.
Because of the sensitivity of this information, you can control whether or not these Command Directives are active.
You do this using the file:
eci_config
Whis is found in the admin directory of the Cradle installation on the server (so the eci_config file that may exist in Cradle client installations on end users’ computers is ignored).
You can enable / disable various ‘sensitive’ Command Directives by editing this file in the Cradle installation on your ‘Cradle server’.
Note that many of the sensitive Command Directives are enabled by default, but $LOGIN is one of those that is not enabled!
3SL will be attending the INCOSE International Symposium held in Edinburgh in the UK between 18th and 21st July 2016. Full details of the event can be found here: http://www.incose.org/symp2016/home/when-where If you are able to travel to Edinburgh, we will be delighted to meet you during the event at our stand B4.
Recently, we have received reports from some customers who have been installing Cradle-7.1, or upgrading to Cradle-7.1, and have seen messages saying that the file:
api-ms-win-crt-stdio-l1-1-0.dll
is missing or is not available.
These messages have been seen in installations on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2012, but could potentially affect other versions of Windows. The messages have only been seen in a small number of Cradle installations. If you want to see more detail, please search for this filename in your favourite search engine, such as DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu, Bing, Yahoo or Google.
In all cases, the solution to these problems is to install Windows updates. Sometimes, you may have to do this more than once, since installing Windows updates may install a pre-requisite for a later Windows update. So, please repeatedly install Windows updates and reboot and keep doing this until there are no more updates to install.
When you have installed the Windows updates, uninstall the Cradle-7.1 that you were trying to install and install it again.
Everything will then be OK.
We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.
The structure of each Cradle database is defined by it’s schema. This contains many parts, but the most fundamental are the ‘item types‘ for the types of information that Cradle will manage and the category and frame attributes of these item types.
When you define the schema, you can specify a ‘description‘ for all of these parts, including:
These descriptions are very useful to end users, because Cradle will display them as tooltips in the UI (User Interface). For example, when the user moves to set a category value, Cradle will display:
When a user moves into the heading for a frame, the UI will display the description of that frame as a tooltip.
A comment as to the purpose of the link rule can be added to the schema. This is a useful aide-mémoire to those editing the rules. However, if a certain action is prohibited by the rules, then the user is shown why.
In this example two rules have been set up, one to allow user Alan to modify sub-part to component links and another to prevent all users modifying the same link. Because of the top-down sequence of rule matching this has the effect of allowing only Alan to modify cross references of this type. The example shows Dewi trying to modify the link attributes between the Pump parent component and the Pump housing linked as a sub-component. The warning shows why this alteration was prevented. The text from the schema is shown in the dialog.
Within Cradle item types can have a number of different categories. Some item types may share the same categories, others may use unique values.
The Group field is available across the whole project. When the schema contains a number of entries for the Group field, these can be applied to any item type. If the project defines values for the Group, selection is only from the defined list. If no pick-list is defined, it is simply a free-form text field, to use as the user wishes.
This example shows three types of assets, Capital, Inventory and Liquid. Some item types may only fall into one group, in this example a physical bedroom is going to be a capital asset, the guest supplies are liquid assets. However, when it comes to fittings, the light is being grouped with the Capital assets and the bed and so on in the Inventory group.
However you choose to use this cross item categorisation, the descriptions given to the group show as tooltips when hovering over the group field in a form.
All categories are set up in the Project Schema. Adding a verification test can be used to ensure only sensible values are added. The types of test that can be set are controlled by the type of data being represented in the category. For example, a date can be tested to be within range, a text category may have a Regex test.
For more information on categories in Cradle, take a look at this useful Cradle help article.
We are pleased to release a new presentation that discusses the need and role for requirements management (RM) and systems engineering (SE) tools and the need for a change in paradigm from document-based processes to data-based processes.
It is available here:
And as a short link here:
Please visit the Resources section of our website: www.threesl.com for this and many other useful resources!
We hope that this presentation is helpful to those considering RM and SE tools!