Tag: editing items

Editing items is done in the Cradle database. You can edit items from WorkBench or from Web Access.

Posted on

Item’s Edit History

Who Changed That? When? Why?

When working in large teams or over a long period an item’s edit history is very useful.

Each item type can have history turned on in the Project Schema via the Project Setup dialog. Users can choose what stage to enable history, Never, Always, Changing draft items that have a baselined instance, Named category matches specified value.

Right clicking on the item and selecting the History -> View Item History. The resulting dialog shows who changed the item on what date and what time. It also displays a comment (This can be made mandatory) entered at the time of editing. If an entry is selected in this list, full details are shown in the lower half of the dialog. If there are a large number of changes, the filter at the top of the dialog can aid finding a relevant change.

Dialog showing an item's edit history
Item’s Edit History

Item History in a Web Browser

Web Access allows you to see an item’s history too. This functionality is in our shipped web UIs. It can be added to your own custom UIs, see the ‘history’ template information.

Web Access showing an item's history
Item History in Web Access
Posted on

Editing Dates in Cradle – A Tip

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 in Cradle
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 Time Display.

How to select the date display preferences
Date Preferences

The Preferences dialog 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.

Article updated 17/09/2018 – Added introduction