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
We are pleased to announce the release of Cradle-7.1 that introduces SysML into Cradle’s existing modelling capabilities and allows SysML to be integrated with the needs, goals, objectives, user stories, sprints, SBS, PBS, test cases, verifications and validations (and so on…) in the full systems engineering lifecycle.
This is more than mere MBSE. This is lifecycle-enabled MBSE!
Only from 3SL and only from Cradle!
For more details, visit www.threesl.com and talk to us at salesdetails@threesl.com or me at: mark.walker@threesl.com or contact me through LinkedIn!
If you want to upgrade to Cradle-7.1, you will need a new Security Code as Security Codes for previous versions (such as 7.0 and 6.8.x) will not work with this release. Also note that if you upgrade Cradle anywhere (such as a client or your server) then you must upgrade all Cradle installations.
Once again, we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who gave up their time in the Beta test programme. Your hard work is very much appreciated!
The new Cradle version (7.1) is very close combining SysML, other modelling notations with full-lifecycle requirements management and systems engineering!
Watch for developments here, or visit: www.threesl.com for more updates!
It is time to announce the end of the Beta test period for Cradle-7.1, our release that introduces SysML into the set of notations that are supported by Cradle’s modelling tools.
We would like to express our thanks to all of the people who provided their time to study Cradle-7.1, and we would also like to thank their organisations for agreeing to this use of their time.
We have received much valuable feedback from the Beta testing and we have included as much of this feedback as possible into the Cradle-7.1 release.
We expect to make an announcement about the release of Cradle-7.1 very soon!
As has been the case with all previous releases of Cradle:
– Security Codes for previous versions of Cradle will not work with Cradle-7.1 – New Security Codes for Cradle-7.1 will be provided, on request, to anyone who has an active maintenance agreement with 3SL
Once again, to all Beta testers, thank you very much!
We have recently seen cases where a Document Publisher template – which is an ordinary Word document – contains references to other Word templates that have been created by an organisation.
Generally, this is OK, everything works correctly as you would expect.
However, if the Word templates (.dot or .dotx files) are not available, or are corrupted, then problems can occur because Word (running inside Document Publisher) may display error messages and prompt you to re-try access to the template, or repeat an attempt to save changes back to it, and so on.
You can either accept that these messages will occur over and over again, or you can disconnect your Document Publisher template (the Word document) from the Word templates.
It is difficult for us to offer general advice as every organisation is different, but our inclination would be to sever connections to these Word templates if you ever seen any warning or error dialogs from Word.
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.
The Beta testing of Cradle-7.1 has been underway for a little while.
The testing is going very well, with useful feedback from the Beta testers about the new SysML capability and the other enhancements in this latest Cradle release.
We expect to make an announcement about Cradle-7.1 at the end of this month.
We would like to express our thanks to those who have been able to get involved, your help is very much appreciated!
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
We are pleased to announce that we have a new white paper available for download from our website. This paper discusses some key issues for compliance with regulations affecting product definition, design and development.
