Tag: settings/configuration/prefs/customise

settings/configuration/preferences/customise:-

Configuring Cradle to run in different environments,

Changing settings to suit you preference,

Customising Cradle to match your ways of working.

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Installing New Security Codes

What is a Security Code?

All Cradle licences are configured by 3SL Security Codes.  This new Security Code must be installed on the host running the CDS (Cradle Database Server). It does not need to be installed on any machines were Cradle clients are installed.

Security Codes are in the file:

  • $CRADLEHOME\.c_config – Linux
  • %CRADLEHOME%\c_config.dat (usually c:\Program Files\Cradle\c_config.dat) – Windows

WARNING: Please be careful NOT to change any part of this file! If you do, you can easily prevent your Cradle system from working!

The Security Code contains the Cradle system’s serial number that identifies the Cradle system, and provides some basic information about it. The composition of the serial number is:

Security Code Structure
Composition of Security Code

The serial number contains the system sequence number that is the unique identifier of the Cradle system. The serial number itself may change if, for example, you purchase additional licences to increase the number of simultaneous users that the system will support, but the system sequence number within the serial number will remain unchanged.

To obtain the serial number of your Cradle system (on Linux) at any time, enter the following command:
c_serial

Installing Security Codes on Windows

  1. Shut down all Cradle tools and servers
  2. Select Cradle Utilities > New Security Code from the Windows Start menu:

    Dialog to enter new Security Code
    Security Code Configuration Utility
  3. Copy and paste the Security Code into the Security Code Configuration Utility dialog and select Decode
  4. If the decoded details are correct, click Configure to apply the new Security Code
  5. Once this is complete, you should reboot the machine, or (if not possible) restart the Cradle servers

Installing Security Codes on Linux

  1. Shut down all Cradle tools and servers
  2. Run the following command, you can then restart the CDS and CWS servers:

c_config -i security-code

where security-code is the 92 character Security Code issued by 3SL. Further information on c_config can be found in the help pages.

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Customise your Quick Access Bar to your needs

Quick Access Bar

The Quick Access Bar (QAB) is intended to provide quick and easy access to all of the types of information in your Cradle database that are relevant to you. It provides easy access to the Automatic scope queries for all item types as a scrollable list of controls, each of which provide access to an automatic menu for an item type.

Controllability

But what about if you only want the bar to display a specific set of item types or you want them in a specific order?

You can customise how the QAB will look for you in User Preferences. Choose which items are to be shown and in which order you wish them to be displayed you even have the option to set whether you want the Quick Access Bar to be shown when WorkBench starts.

Quick Acces Bar in User Preferences
Customising your Quick Access Bar

For further information on customising your UI see this previous blog post.

Related Article:

If you need to set these values for everyone in the project, it can be achieved with the Cradle initialisation file.

 

UPDATED: April 2020 – Related article
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Item Attributes

Item Attributes

Items have attributes that describe the item and store its data. Item attributes are used to sort, categorise and group items. They also hold the unique data forming the main purpose of the item. There are three main kinds of attribute:

    •  Predefined – used to manage items, and include attributes such as name, number, version, owner, security classification and last modification date.
    •  Categories – small amounts of data as free text, single value picklists or multiple value picklists, or abstract data types such as dates or reals. These are also primary database indexes.
    • Frames – attributes for storing large amounts of data, as text or binary. These can be queried but are not primary indexes.

     

  • The predefined attributes are always present. You can inspect their values, query the database to retrieve items based on the values of these attributes, and in some cases, directly set the values of the attributes. for example The key, group, comment or description. Other predefined attributes are central to Cradle’s access control mechanisms and the Cradle configuration management system (CMS). These are set by Cradle, for example modified date or status, they cannot be directly modified. You cannot remove predefined attributes from an item.To change the item’s user definable attributes, you will need to go to Project Setup and in Options select Item Definitions as shown below
    Attributes
    Project Setup – Item Definitions

     

  • Here you will be able to add, modify and remove an item type’s attributes. For example if you wanted to add a picture to an item type, you could pick the JPEG frame type. If you needed to add CAD drawing file, you would define a frame type to hold the data and then add an instance of this to each of the item types needing to store this information.

Hierarchical Numbering

The hierarchical number describes an item’s position in the hierarchy. It is usually stored in the Key attribute but it can be stored in a category if you wish. Hierarchical numbers are not fixed. They can be changed and reorganised.

  1. A prefix (this is optional)
  2. A separator
  3. A number

The hierarchical separator can be:

  • A dot or period (this is the default), e.g. fred.1.2.3
  • A hyphen, e.g. fred-1-2-3
  • A slash, e.g. fred/1/2/3
  • For further information regarding attributes please click here
Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Expaned on how the key attribute is special to control hierarchies
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Checking the integrity of your downloaded Cradle files

Are Downloaded Files Correct?

Want to ensure the files you have downloaded are the original files published by 3SL?

On our website as well as being able to download the Cradle software we supply two text files. These files contain checksums, which are used to ensure the integrity of a file after it has been transmitted from one storage device to another.Screenshot showing checksum download on website

Checksums available on 3SL website

SHA512.txt

This file contains SHA512 checksums for the files. You can generate a SHA512 checksum using the sha512sum command. For example:

sha512sum Cradle72_Setup.exe

Compare the output to the contents of the sha512.txt file.

Screenshot showing a SHA512 checksum result
SHA512 Integrity Checksum on Windows

MD5.txt

This file contains MD5 checksums for the files. You can generate a MD5 checksum using the md5sum command. For example:

md5sum Cradle72_Setup.tar.gz

Compare the output to the contents of the md5.txt file. The md5sum utility is available for Windows from various websites on the Internet.

Screenshot showing a MD5 checksum result
MD5 Integrity Checksum on Linux
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Can I reset the auto number?

Auto Numbering Change and Reset

The short answer is yes you can reset an item’s auto numbering. The more complex answer is a word of caution.
Firstly to reset the auto number for an item you need ACCESS_BYPASS, or PROJECT project privileges.
This is to prevent any accidental operations by a user.
Secondly you should ensure you understand the issue you are trying to resolve and the consequences of resetting in a live database.

Item Numbering

Every item in the database has a unique identity made from a combination of attributes. These usually include the Identity, Version and Draft. Model based information includes the Domain and MUID. The identity can be manually entered or automatically filled. There are benefits to both. For example; if your customer sent you a set of user requirements in a CSV file, you would want to retain whatever ID system they had used UF1.45 to UF6.78 having a Cradle Auto ID and then having to place their ID in the Name field would make little sense. On the other hand when raising a new Issue, you’d expect them to be sequentially numbered without having to find the previous item and mentally add ‘1’ and type into a field.

When Values Need Resetting

In the case where a batch of items have been imported or created, but whilst at draft a decision has been made that none of them are required, or are fundamentally wrong, they would normally be deleted. The next item to be created would then have an auto number of say “Res-103” which may not be appropriate. In this case resetting the count for the “Result” item type makes sense.

When Values Need Setting

It is possible that batches of requirements come in from various sources, it may be convenient to start each batch at a ‘nice’ number point “Reference-1 … Reference-560” and then “Reference-1000 … Reference-1304“. In this case setting the number by advancing the count would be appropriate.
If new versions of the item were brought in by import expecting to overwrite the old ones, and the user forgot to mark “Ignore project’s current auto numbering” you would end up with two versions of the item. In that case 1..n and n+1..2n+1, deleting items n+1..2n+1 and choosing “Set Highest” would return the database to the point before the mistake.

When Caution Should be Exercised

Once the items are stored in the database, their Identities should remain fixed. Creating a new version of an item would normally involve the original version being baselined, a Change Request being raised and a Change Task being issued to allow the work to create the next draft version of the item. In this case the identity remains the same but the two versions of the item are unique by their Version and Draft. Changing the auto number when there are items in the database and then creating new items of that type would cause conflict with items already stored. This is not a desirable effect. Therefore, the message is be careful, this feature is necessary and useful in some cases but incorrect use could have undesirable side-effects.

showing the Reset Auto Number Counts dialog
Auto Number Reset
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Can I customise UI to show my most used commands?

Easy Customisation Using Cradle Start-Pages

Yes you can customise the front end UI shown to users.  The simplest way to  customise most used commands, is add them to a Start Page. The example below places a company logo, and the three most used queries on the start page. These are considered the most used actions by the company and therefore, they want them easily accessible when the tool starts. The links are customised to run the specific queries needed most.

Additionally an “Admin” section has been added to get at the User Preferences and Project Schema Setup. This could normally be shown collapsed or ‘rolled up’ as this is less frequently used.

Screen shot of a Cradle-RM Desktop edition with customised start page
Customised Start Page

This is the most basic of examples, set so everyone in the project sees the same page when they start up. However, in large teams, start pages can be customised to the Cradle user, personal, team or user type. The selection of page is set in the User Preferences.

Project Phases

In an enterprise environment the company process may be more tightly defined. Customisation of the flow through the project lifecycle would be better represented as groups of actions in the Phase sidebar.

Cradle 7.4 Start Page Enhancement

It is now possible to copy panels and entries and to refresh your list of queries.

When you insert an entry into a start page, the newly created entry is created beneath the selected one, rather than at the bottom of the list. You also have the option to copy start page panels and start page entries.

When creating start pages, it is possible to add queries. If you found there was a query missing that you needed, and you or a colleague created it, it is not automatically added to the cached list in the start page setup. Clicking the  Refresh icon will now relist all the available queries.

Start Page query refresh
Query list refresh button

For more information on Start Pages click here

Updated 09/08/2018 – Cradle 7.4 Enhancement
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Alerts in Cradle WorkBench

All Change – Tell me now!

Keep abreast of what changes are going on in a project by setting alerts. These can reflect system level changes such as a schema change, or can be set for individual items.

Recipients

You can control who gets the alert by selecting the recipient to be:

  • The default distribution
  • A particular user or
  • User list

Additionally item level alerts can be controlled by setting a category value containing the user name of the recipient, (We advise this category is set to ‘mandatory’ to ensure users fill it in, as the fallback will be to all in the project).

Direct

You can eve enter an alert directly from the using the “New…” button if you need to communicate to other users.

Setting alerts
Alerts and Settings

Priority Settings

You can choose the priority setting for alerts in the Project schema. They can be set as Urgent, High, Normal or Low

setting alert priorities and viewing the results
Alert Priorities

When the alerts are shown in the user’s Alerts dialog, they are coloured appropriately, until they have been read and then they are marked in black. An additional “Sort by”  allow the user to order by Priority, Type, Date or Status making it easier to keep up to date with what’ and when things are changing in a project.

Article Updated 13/07/2018 – Cradle 7.4 Priority settings for Alerts
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Single User to Enterprise Conversion

Project Grown?

Has your project grown? Is it too big for a single user? Do you need to work in an enterprise environment?

When you first start with a project you may just need one person working away at the initial Requirements (single-user environment). However, when more stakeholders, designers, reviewers and managers join (an enterprise environment) the installation needs to grow.

The good news is that in Cradle this is simply a reconfiguration of your Cradle licence for an Enterprise version and then you can all carry on with the same project.

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Linux or Windows

Spot the difference

Cradle is supported on whichever platform your business uses. Cradle WorkBench will run on Linux/Windows  Cradle Database Server (CDS) is equally at home on a Linux or Windows box. Of course Web Access is available wherever you browser runs. As you can see from the screenshots there is no need for users to learn a new UI between versions.

Screenshots in Linux and Windows
Windows or Linux

Convert Later?

Yes absolutely you can convert between versions. That’s great news for your IT department, if they decide to change the server machine they’ll need to port the data across to the new installation and then chat to salesdetails@threesl.com to obtain a new licence.

Continue reading “Linux or Windows”