Running a Spell Checker

Nott Shoor of the Spelling?!

Items in a database can have many different fields, some or all of which may need their spelling checked. On Cradle installations with Tool Suite the Spellchecker tool can check items that are returned by a query.

  1. Launch Spellchecker, and login. (This can be done by launching the standalone application or selecting it from the Tools menu in WorkBench)
  2. Choose the query you want to run
  3. Check which attributes are required to be checked
  4. Run the checks and correct any errors.

Note: Locked items can not be checked.

Dashboard Dials – In Style

Traditional KPIs in a Dashboard

Cradle has supported KPIs being shown in the sidebar of WorkBench or Web Access for a number of years. This gives a quick overview of the health of the project. It’s giving a rating for each of the measurements and coloured highlighting to draw attention to those areas that need further input.

Showing the KPIs in a traditional dashboard table in sidebar
Traditional Dashboard

Due to its compactness, this table style allows many KPIs to be shown in a small space. However, one of the limitations with this approach is that the scale of the measurement and the relative position of the current value are not immediately obvious.

Bring on the Dials

A dial on the other-hand can display the full range, and the relative position. This allows a much faster assimilation of the data being shown to the user.

showing different sizes for dashboard dials
Dashboard Dial Sizes

New Cradle 7.2 Dashboard Dials Feature

Cradle’s dashboard dials are available in a number of sizes, thus allowing more important dials to be clearly seen. The size is set per dial as:

  • Large
  • Medium
  • Small
  • Minimal

There are also a number of styles available for the dashboard as a whole:

  • Round 270°
  • Round 180°
  • Round 140°
  • Text

These can be displayed with the following pointer types:

  • None
  • Triangle
  • Stick
  • Needle
  • Coloured
showing the different dial and pointer styles
Dashboard Styles

It’s also possible to print these dials to the standard Cradle outputs:

  • SVG (for display in a browser),
  • RTF (for display in Microsoft® Word and similar),
  • PostScript®
  • PowerPoint®
  • EPS
  • FrameMaker®
  • HPGL
Showing an rtf version of the dashboard dials
Dashboard RTF Output

Full End to End Document Processing

Concept to Creation

Whatever you are making, whatever service you are delivering, you need a tool that supports your process from end to end. You can’t expect a successful outcome without control of your project’s lifecycle.

Complete End to End Document Processing

Despite living in an electronic world, where the promise was a paperless office, we are often faced with needing to manage documents at a number of points over the duration of the project. This is not surprising, even if we don’t handle hard copy,  a document is an tangible object.

Humans relate to the concept of a complete package of information being contained in the document. They generally make good reading if you start at the beginning and read through to the end. Non-fiction documents may be more likely to be read by accessing the index or contents and turning to a page number. Sometimes in an electronic copy there may be a hyper-link to another part of the document. On the whole, however, the format is fixed. You can’t easily re-arrange a document to see its contents from a different perspective, or organise it hierarchically based on a section of your choosing.

Managed and linked requirements, designs, constraints, tests, diagrams and definitions, need to be arranged, searched and traced, to reach our end goal effectively. The ability to see which customer requirements are ultimately verified by a test, or what system requirements are impacted by a customer change to a requirement are invaluable.

Cradle for Your Document Processing

From a document point of view, the triplet of Document Loader, WorkBench and Document Publisher covers the full lifecycle.

  • Customers often provide their initial requirements in the form of a MS Word document. Document Loader will parse, tag and link this information as it is drawn into Cradle’s database.
  • WorkBench is the ideal tool to develop and design, record and trace your project.
  • When the project is at a stage that needs a formatted output, Document Publisher is used.

Continue reading “Full End to End Document Processing”

See More of Your Items’ Details

Items with large amounts of data in might be useful for current projects but if you can’t see all the information inside that item then this can be quite frustrating. Cradle allows you to customise views, drag out items and reshape queries to best suit you and your projects. Very useful when dealing with large amounts of data.

 

Needing all the details for your item to be on display?.

Once you have run a query, you may find the WorkBench ‘View’ you have chosen isn’t quite big enough to see some of the cells. This can be frustrating as there is a balance between the number of items shown and the detail shown for each item. You may need to see more information for one or for all the items shown.

Solution

You could, of course, edit the ‘View’ (provided you have the CREATE_DEFS privilege). However,  you don’t need to change it just to see more of your items’ details on the screen.

Cells in a ‘View’ can be dragged Selecting of Document View from toolbarwider or deeper. You can switch to ‘Document View’ mode to increase the cells height to match their content.

Alternatively, clicking the icon is a quick way to open in a ‘Form’.

Article Updated 30/01/2019 – Added intro

Check You Have IPv6 Running

New Cradle-7.2 Feature

If you need to check your new installation is running IPv6, then you can use Project Manager, or the Help->About screen in WorkBench, Document Publisher etc.

There’s a whole host of other information on these screens which will tell you; how your client found the CDS (Cradle Database Server), which language variant is active and which licences you are currently using.

Showing WorkBench and Project Manager IPv6 connection status
IPv6 Connection Display

Cradle User Interface Languages

What ever your language…..

Cradle is currently available in available in eight  English/ English US, Chinese(zh), Dutch(nl),  German(de), French(fr), Korean(ko), Russian(ru) and Welsh(cy), languages.

WorkBench yn Gymraeg
Welsh UI for Cradle WorkBench

If there is a UI (User Interface) language you would like, please speak to us and we will quote for other translations.  Alternatively you can add your own Language, Country or Regional variant. Use the supplied Message Catalogue Manager software tool in Cradle.

Wherever You Are

Local Location, Remote Location?

No matter where Alan is he can get to his project. This remote access could be through WorkBench or Web Access, both part of the Cradle suite.

If you have access to a browser you can configure your installation to allow remote access  to your projects enabling the most common functions to be performed from anywhere in the world.

For full power (offering all the requirements management software and systems engineering tools available), users access the same projects via the WorkBench application. Provided the network allows, a client installation of WorkBench can also access the CDS (Cradle Database Server) from around the globe, but a Citrix installation may be more desirable allowing remote access to a server / multi client installation.

Iamge showing Cradle connectivity
Cradle connectivity

The tool provided to web users is really the contents of web pages displayed in their browsers. These pages are created by the CWS from:

  • A set of HTML templates, at least one for each type of item in the database
  • A set of page designs supplied with the CWS
  • The items in your database

The user has full control of the contents of these HTML templates, e.g.:

  • What the web interface looks like
  • What facilities it provides
  • How these facilities are accessed
showing same item in Web Access and in WorkBench
WorkBench or Web Access
Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added Image showing connectivity and more info about Web Access

User information

Who?

User information can be used to show such things as who has created an item, edited an item and when the item was created.

Chances are in a big project not every user will know all the other users on a project. If you need to know a bit more about who edited an item, you can hover over the changer for a tool-tip in a Cradle Form in WorkBench. This will show the additional information held for each of the users in the User Setup dialog.

To set User Profile details, this is done via “User Setup”  as you can see in the screenshot below showing the Description of the User and the Location of the user.

 

Screenshot showing User Setup dialog
User Setup

These details are then shown when hovering over the user in areas such as Forms to show when the user last modified this item.

user tooltip showing details
Show user information

When / What ?

There are many more fields that will give you additional information information, dates and times will show the full underlying UTC, categories will show their description,  go on have a hover and discover.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added extra information

Linked Items in a Form

Seeing other linked items

When you want to see the other items that are linked to the current item in a Cradle display, you can do so by showing the linked items in a Form. This is an effective way to get a comprehensive overview of the interconnections in a formatted and repeatable way.

Linked items shown in a form
Items that are linked to the current item

You can find more information on setting up a form to display this links in this Cradle help article.

Alternatives

You can see items that are linked to the subject item in a number of different ways including:

  • Configure a View to show a linked items column
  • Use the right click context menu and select  Show  Linked  Items
  • Double click the item in a Table View to expand extra rows
  • Follow the [+] expansions in a tree view

The View method is as repeatable as setting in a form, the other methods are transient.

Article updated 05/12/2018 – Added link to Cradle help

Make a Hierarchy Diagram (HID)

What is a Hierarchy Diagram (HID)?

A Hierarchy Diagram (HID) is a diagram style that is used to graphically show cross references between items. A HID is a tree that starts with the item of interest (source item) and shows the items that are linked to it by cross references. Each of these items’ cross references can be shown with their cross referenced items.

What’s linked to what?

Generate a HID (Hierarchy Diagram) in Cradle for a clear graphical representation of how your items interconnect. Simple to see what depends on what at many levels.

 

Hierarchy Diagram Options and Information

When a HID is opened, the Control sidebar is refreshed to show the following tabs:

  • Starmap – Is a highly zoomed view of the diagram.
Starmap
Starmap
  • From Item – Shows details of the from item.
From Item
From Item
  • Hierarchy – Ability to define a hierarchy and set the links to follow for each item type.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy
  • Diagram Summary Information – Shows the number of items, cross references, levels and symbols in the current HID.
Diagram Summary
Diagram Summary

If you would like more information on Hierarchy Diagrams and how you can use them, you may find this Cradle help article useful.

Article Updtaed29/01/2019 –  Added more information and examples