Tag ' Cradle database '

4th August 202313th June 2023

Cradle Modules – PDM

The Cradle PDM module provides the infrastructure for all other Cradle modules. Its scalability and flexibility create an industrial strength, proven, shared data environment for even the largest projects:

Databases

Cradle supports any number of databases, each with its own schema, CM system and users. Each database supports many projects. Use the Project Manager tool to organise this environment by user-defined criteria, for example as hierarchies.

Each database stores any number of items, of any number of types (requirements, risks, classes, user stories, functions) defined by a UI. Items have any number of attributes, each of a user-defined type, that manage up to 1 TByte of any type of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in external files, URLs or another tool or environment.

Calculations

User-defined calculations are supported in all parts of Cradle and can be displayed as graphs, in views and user-defined reports. User-defined rules can be applied to automatically set attribute values or perform calculations, to maintain the integrity within and between items.

Cross References

Items can be cross referenced, with optional user-defined link types and groups. Links have user-defined attributes to justify, parametrise, explain or characterise them. You control which links are used to navigate or report traceability, based on link type or group, direction and link attribute values. Links are both direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

Process Tailored Environment

You use start pages and a phase hierarchy to build an environment tailored to your process. End users only need to be trained in your interface, reducing training time and costs:

Start pages are text and graphics controls that perform your choice of operations simply and easily
The phase hierarchy shows the process as a hierarchy in which an agile or phase activity, task, sprint, report or document is run by a mouse click. Different parts of the phase hierarchy can be shown to each user or stakeholder group.

Traceability and coverage views are available as trees, nested and pivot tables, matrices and Hierarchy Diagrams. Unique transitive links give traceability across the full system lifecycle.

Configuration Management

Items evolve through versions that are managed in baselines and controlled by a built-in CM system, with mechanisms for review, baseline and version control, full change control, and audit trails.

Cradle can track all changes. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Items can be compared across edits and in baselines. Edits can raise alerts to users, and mark related items as suspect. All edits are permanently available, for change logs.

Adaptations

Cradle provides adaptations to allow variants of items. This mechanism is ideal for databases that contain a library of standard items and projects that use the library, and contribute to it.

Access Controls

Access controls apply to all items based on user roles, privileges, security clearances and skills. Users can be grouped in a hierarchy of teams, to create any access control scheme, such as for customers, subcontractors and IV&V. The creation and manipulation of links can be controlled, by item or user.

Cradle is multi-user. It locks information at item level, with automatic database commit after an edit. This maximises users’ interaction with the database and guarantees all data s up-to-date.

Alerts

Cradle’s alert mechanism sends messages by email (SMTP or IMAP), Cradle or both. Alerts can be selectively enabled and disabled. Alerts track events on items, including edit, review and formal change.

Discussions

The Cradle discussion mechanism allows even read-only users to add comments to items. Four other commenting mechanisms are provided.

Project Planning

Cradle can manage project plans and WBS. User task lists are maintained. WBS structures and progress data can be exchanged bidirectionally with external PM tools. Cradle can generate burn-down and earned-value graphs on any user-defined criterion to monitor progress.

API

Cradle is open and extensible. It provides multiple import/export formats, an API, a user-definable event-driven command interface, interfaces with other tools and bidirectional interfaces to Microsoft Office.

Query and Report Data

Cradle provides uniquely powerful data query and visualisation facilities. Each user’s environment can be tailored by defining custom queries, views, forms, navigations, matrices, reports and other facilities. All customisations have a scope, to be specific to the end user, or shared with other users of the same type (such as all customers or all managers), the user’s team, the entire project, or all projects.

Any desired compliance, coverage or traceability report can be created quickly/easily using Cradle’s queries, multi-row views/nested table view, and saved for later use.

Licensing

Cradle has floating, dynamic licensing and low cost read-only users. Open and named user licences are available. Everything described here is free of charge.

Licences, databases and schemas are interchangeable across Linux and Windows 8.1, 10, 11, Server 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019.

Optional support for Oracle and MySQL.

Feature Summary

Please contact 3SL for further information about Cradle PDM licences.

21st July 202313th June 2023

Product Range – Cradle Enterprise

Cradle Enterprise Overview

Collaborative Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
Scalable to millions of items of information
Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
Full traceability and coverage analyses
User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle Enterprise is a complete multi-user solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, logical, process, architecture or design models in SysML, UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS and other notations. Optionally group models in hierarchies and link elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

Control the work with team hierarchies, roles and access controls. Review items with discussions, user-defined workflows and built-in CM with baselines, full version control and formal change management.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as a URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use through point-and-click UIs.

Major Features

The major features are:

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle Enterprise is part of the Cradle product range that includes low cost, single-user tools.

Product Range Highlights

Applies to agile and phase projects
Application lifecycle management
Requirements management
Modelling / MBSE
Test execution / risk management
Full lifecycle integration
V&V and compliance management
Reporting / document publishing
Metrics
Dashboards
Project plans
User-defined UIs
Custom web UIs
Configuration management
Multi user

14th July 202312th July 2023

Product Range – Cradle-SE Pro

Cradle-SE Pro Overview

Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
Scalable to millions of items of information
Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
Full traceability and coverage analyses
User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-SE Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of analysis, architecture, logical, process or design models using UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS, SysML and other notations. Group models in hierarchies and link all elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-SE Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

Applies to agile and phase projects
Application lifecycle management
Requirements management
Modelling / MBSE
Full lifecycle integration
V&V
Reporting
Document publishing
Metrics
Dashboards
Project plans
Compliance management
Single user

13th July 20231st November 2023

July Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the July 2023 newsletter from 3SL!

This newsletter contains a mixture of news and technical information about us, and our requirements management and systems engineering tool “Cradle”. We would especially like to welcome everyone who has purchased Cradle in the past month and those who are currently evaluating Cradle for their projects and processes.

We hope that 3SL and Cradle can deliver real and measurable benefits that help you to improve the information flow within, the quality and timeliness of, and the traceability, compliance and governance for, all of your current and future projects.

If you have any questions about your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support.

PDUIDs

When we work with information, we need a way to distinguish each piece of information from all other pieces of information so we can be sure we have found what we were searching for. We do this by marking each piece of information in a unique way.

For information in databases, the markings are unique values called keys or identities. A piece of information can have multiple identities, each for a different purpose. For example, although a company’s payroll system is likely to identify each person by a unique Employee ID, each person’s details will also include their governmental tax ID (such as a National Insurance number, a Unique Taxpayer Reference, a Sozialversicherungsnummer or a Social Security Number). This tax ID will also be unique and so could also be used as an identity for that person’s information.

Cradle has two forms of identity, item identities and Project Database Unique IDs (PDUIDs).

We will publish a series of blog posts about PDUIDs, describing what they are, how to view them, how to use them, and how PDUIDs can be managed when you import information into your databases.

Item Identities

There are several basic item types in Cradle. Each basic item type uses a different combination of attributes to create a unique Item ID for items of that type:

An item is identified by this Item ID and a unique Instance ID, typically a version and draft.

PDUID Structure

Project Database Unique IDs (PDUIDs) are a single, consistent, numbering system for all database information. Each PDUID is a 26 character string that contains a Database ID to identify a Cradle system, a Project ID to identify a project database and a Unique ID:

A PDUID references all instances of an item. Therefore the combination of a PDUID and an Instance ID (a version and draft) will identify a specific item. So, this is an alternative to the Item ID and Instance ID and has the advantage of being consistent and a single numbering sequence for all types of item.

Further Details

For further details in this part 1 of a description of PDUIDs, please see the full blog entry here.

Remote Databases

A Cradle system can contain any number of databases. For the best performance, we recommend that databases are stored on disks connected to the machine that runs your Cradle Database Server (CDS). But, this may not be possible.

For example:

The local system may not have enough disk space available
The information in the database may be classified and must be stored separately

Here each database will be stored on a remote filesystem that must be referenced by a pathname so the CDS can work with it.

Further Details

For further details of remote databases, please see the full blog entry here.

Over Half Way Through the Year

It’s true; the 2nd July marked the halfway point of the calendar year. That went fast didn’t it?

It feels like we only just celebrated the New Year and now we are six months away from doing it all over again.

At this time of year, it is good to reflect on what’s already passed and what is to come this year. Here are some ways that might help if you are looking to refocus and recharge over the summer months.

Check in on Team Goals

How are the goals the team set at the beginning of the year going?
When was the last time your team reviewed them?

Now is a great time to reflect on any progress. Is your team on track? Is everybody on the same page?

Whatever the progress so far this year, there will be lessons to be learnt from it. It’s time to put an action plan in place for the remainder of the year. Now is a good time to get the team goals back on track:

Ask who do you need to help achieve those goals?
What’s the best way to communicate with them?
Is there an alternative way to achieve them?

Communication

Summer can be especially busy; school summer holidays, weekly events, fewer people in the office, and various demands can bring stress to everyone.

With all these additional activities going on, it’s easy for people to get distracted, lost and even burnt out.

Now is a great time to contact your team, employees and other connections. It can be as simple as a chat over a cup of coffee, a walk and talk or a business/working lunch. This will allow you to connect in a more casual way, which in turn, can help strengthen the link between you and your team.

Help your Team Avoid a Summer Decline

It’s no surprise that productivity can fall off a cliff when the sun comes out! Thoughts of ice cream, beer gardens and future holidays can lead our minds to wander off and our focus can end up in the bin.

Now is a good time to prepare your team and business to avoid any slump.

Congratulate your team on their efforts so far this year. One way to keep the momentum going is to set small achievable goals, something that can be done within a week to a month can help. As you complete and reach each one, the team will get a boost.

Having weekly/monthly meetings can allow the team to see those goals that have been achieved. Using metrics, dashboards and graphs can help your team see the progress made each week, month, year or more.

This progress will give reasons to celebrate and that can only be a good thing!

Remember: the team working together will make the dream work!

Feedback

We continue to receive positive feedback from our customers. We really appreciate ALL feedback, as this helps us to assess and improve both the products and services we provide.

In June, we provided a Cradle training course to one of our customers in Australia. They kindly sent the following feedback:

“Extremely informative classes. We are very appreciative of the customised content tailored for our envisaged use of the tool”

Independence Day (4th July)

4th July was a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the Declaration of Independence which was ratified by the Second Continental Congress on July 4th 1776, establishing the United States of America.

Social Media

We commemorated #DDay – 79 years ago. “We will remember them“:

Some of our customers, both old and new, attended various shows/exhibitions etc, e.g.:

@ZFGroup at AutoTech Detroit
@the_MTC_org at Smart Factory Expo
@Alstom at @VivaTech
@MirionHQ at TRTR Research and Training Reactors Conference

@SercoGroup announced they have been awarded nine contracts to help the #IRIDE space programme. This programme is led by the Italian government and implemented by the European Space Agency. This is one of the most amibitous Earth Observation programmes in Europe.

With electric vehicles taking over the roads, our customer @Enphase talked about EV chargers.

Looking Back

Last month we discussed:

We would also like to thank all attendees on our Configuration Management course which we provided in June.

Still to Come this Month

Project Administration Course – July 18th to 19th
Cradle Introduction Course – July 25th to 26th

Your Highlights!

If you have any company news or achievements that you would like 3SL to share in any of our newsletters then please let us know.

13th July 2023

Remote Databases

For example:

The local system may not have enough disk space available
The information in the database may be classified and must be stored separately

Here each database will be stored on a remote filesystem that must be referenced by a pathname so the CDS can work with it.

Remote Linux Filesystems

On Linux, a remote filesystem is mounted as a pathname. The CDS works through this pathname to access the remote filesystem. Remote filesystems include NFS (network file system) and others.

3SL does not recommend the use of CIFS (Common Internet File System) filesystems. We have seen several Linux systems that use CIFS to mount remote Windows filesystems. Sadly all these CIFS filesystems have provided very poor performance to the Linux server.

For NFS mounts, we suggest that you examine block sizes of 4K or more and consider nosuid mounts.

Remote Windows Filesystems

We are sure you are familiar with drive letters such as G: or H: that are the connection point to filesystems on remote systems.

For example, a filesystem disk1 on server myfileserver1 can be mounted as the X: drive. You can navigate to a pathname on X: such as:

X:\Cradle Databases\ABCD

You cannot use drive letters in the pathname to create a Cradle database on a remote drive. Drive letters are specific to a Windows profile and are created only when that profile is active.

So, please use UNC pathnames to refer to Cradle databases on remote drives. UNC pathnames are of the form:

\\servername\path

So in the above example, the pathname to the ABCD database would be:

\\myfileserver1\disk1\Cradle Databases\ABCD

Access to Remote Windows Databases

You must ensure that the access rights to remote directories will allow the CDS to search all directories inside the database and give RW access to all of the database files. Please note that the CDS runs as the local SYSTEM user on the machine where it is run. So it is this user who must have search, read and write access on the remote filesystem.

If you wish, you can control the user who will run the CDS. To do this iteratively (you may need to have Administrator rights depending on your system):

Open Task Manager and in the Services tab, stop the Cradle Services Manager
Open Windows Explorer
Navigate into your Cradle system and look in the folder bin\exe\windows
Press SHIFT and right-click on the CDS executable: crsvr.exe and choose Run As and enter the username and password that you want the CDS to run as

If you want to permanently change how the CDS runs, then (you may need to have Administrator rights on your system):

Open services.msc, the MMC (Microsoft Management Console) or Services Control Manager (depending on your version of Windows) to see all services and stop the Cradle Services Manager
Select the Cradle Services Manager, right click and choose Properties
Select Log On in the dialog and specify the user that you want the CDS to run as and the password for this account:
Click OK to close the dialog
Start the service and then close the list of services

7th July 202313th June 2023

Product Range – Cradle-SE Desktop

Cradle-SE Desktop Overview

Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
Scalable to millions of items of information
Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
Full traceability and coverage analyses
User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-SE Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of analysis, process, architecture and design models using UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS, SysML and other notations. Group models in hierarchies and link all elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Major Features

The major features are:

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-SE Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

Applies to agile and phase projects
Application lifecycle management
Requirements management
Modelling / MBSE
Full lifecycle integration
V&V
Reporting
Metrics
Dashboards
Project plans
Compliance management
Single user

30th June 202313th June 2023

Product Range – Cradle-RM Pro

Cradle-RM Pro Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
Scalable to millions of items of information
Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
Full traceability and coverage analyses
User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Track and View Information

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Major Features

The major features are:

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-RM Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

Applies to agile and phase projects
Application lifecycle management
Requirements management
Full lifecycle integration
V&V
Reporting
Document publishing
Metrics
Dashboards
Project plans
Compliance management
Single user

23rd June 202313th June 2023

Product Range – Cradle-RM Desktop

Cradle-RM Desktop Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
Scalable to millions of items of information
Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
Full traceability and coverage analyses
User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Track and View Information

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Major Features

The major features are:

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-RM Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

Applies to agile and phase projects
Application lifecycle management
Requirements management
Full lifecycle integration
V&V
Reporting
Metrics
Dashboards
Project plans
Compliance management
Single user

4th November 2022

Checking Database Integrity

Data integrity refers to the accuracy, completeness and reliability of data stored within your Cradle database. Checking database integrity is important as it guarantees both the traceability and searchability of your data. It also increases the performance and stability of your data. Maintaining the integrity of your data is essential. As you collect more and more data within your Cradle project, it is a priority to maintain the integrity of this data, otherwise the data is worthless.

Error checking ensures that your Cradle data hasn’t been compromised, e.g. during upgrades/imports etc. We recommend that integrity checks are done on a regular basis.

In Cradle, there are a couple of ways to check the integrity of your database:

Please note that these checks must only be run when there are NO other users active in the database. If you are in doubt as to whether you are the only user active in the database, then DO NOT run these checks. If you do, damage can occur.

Item Integrity

The Item Integrity option allows you to perform integrity checks on your Cradle database. This option is available from the Project tab in WorkBench:

The Frame Version Checks detect missing versions of any frames or missing records in any version of any frame for the item type specified. Errors can be fixed using the Fix button.

There are many Item Checks which are explained here.

Many of these checks can be made subject to one of the following scopes:

Superseded or retired – Selects items with a status of S (Superseded) or T (Retired)
Latest baseline – Selects items with a status of B (Open Baseline)
Deleted – Selects items with a status of D (Deleted)
Current – All current items

If you want to produce a report of the item integrity check, ensure to select the Generate a report checkbox.

Cross Reference Integrity

The Cross Reference Integrity Check option checks the cross references in your Cradle database.

The current set of cross references is scanned to find any cross references that are invalid. Any cross reference is only counted once in these checks. So if a cross reference is dangling and also invalid, it will only appear once in the counts.

The Cross Reference Checks are explained here.

When the integrity check has been ran you have the following options:

Fix – Fix the cross references
Export – Export the group to a CSV file
List – List the group individually
Delete – Delete the cross references from the group

The Fix and Delete options for privileged users must only be run when there are no other active users in the database. If you are in any doubt, do NOT run these operations.

If you want to produce a report of the cross reference integrity check, ensure to select the Generate error report checkbox.

16th September 202216th September 2022

Moving Cradle Projects

Are you upgrading/updating your servers? Here we explain moving Cradle projects from an old server to a new server. There are two ways to do this:

Moving projects to a new server with the same Cradle version
Moving projects to a new server and upgrading to a new Cradle version

Both of these scenarios are detailed below.

Please note if users have Personal definitions, e.g. if they are are using Sessions, these will either need to be copied or exported and imported to the new server. Personal definitions are located in $CRADLEHOME\admin\definitions\personal and the folders have the users names. If copying the definitions they need to be placed in the same location within the personal folder.

New Server with Same Cradle Version

If you are not upgrading Cradle at this time, this is really simple to do.

Create the Cradle projects on the new server with the same project code as previously created on the old server. Ensure the pathname is the location where the databases will be stored.
Create Project dialog
Copy the contents of the Cradle projects on the old server to the new server. The directory contains all of the data including user profiles, project setup, definitions etc.
Project Contents
New Server with New Cradle Version

If you are upgrading the Cradle version as well as migrating to a new server, this is slightly more complex.

The safest method (although can be time consuming) is to create export files of the existing Cradle databases and then import them into the new server installation.

When exporting the information from the “old” server, ensure Owner is set to Everything as shown below:
Once the new version of Cradle has been installed on the new server, you need to create the Cradle projects on the new server.
In the new project you can then import the data exported from the old server . When importing, ensure Owner is set to As in file, Overwrite is set to On and the top four validation checkboxes are selected:
Repeat this for all projects

Another way to achieve this is to copy the project directories from the old server on to the new server and then manually convert the projects.

Create the Cradle projects on the new server with the same project code as previously created on the old server with the pathname being the location where the databases will be stored.
Create Project dialog
Copy the contents of the Cradle projects on the old server and overwrite the contents of the newly created projects on the new server. The directory contains all of the data including user profiles, project setup, definitions etc.
Manually run the necessary converters to ensure the new projects are in the same format as the new Cradle version installed. Please note this may be several converters if converting from a much older version.

Note: Please ensure the projects have been converted BEFORE logging in.