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Once you have captured your data into Cradle you'll want to display, search and manipulate it.
The quickest way to display the data you have just entered into Cradle is to run one of the built in queries for the data type. In WorkBench these can be found along the top of the screen.
The drop down will give you a list of queries for that item type. Selecting the - All query will give you the most generic unfiltered set of results.
Queries can be built to filter and sort on a large number of item attributes. Cradle default schemas come with a range of these queries for you to load, run and alter. Once you have spent the time building and altering a query you can save it at various scope levels ranging from personal, through user type to project.
Launch the Query Details dialog by selecting the spy glass from the WorkBench toolbar.
Once saved the query can be recalled and run by selecting it from a list shown in the top line of the Query Details dialog.
Selecting New will run a new instance of your query, or if you have already run it you can tweak the values and re apply it.
Queries can be a created in Web Access or WorkBench from scratch, first by choosing an item type and then by adding filtering criteria until just the results you want are shown. Once the query is saved it can be run as shown above.
The queries results show in a view, which is a list of the results shown as a simple list, table, tree or document format. The details of the attributes of an item that will show as columns in the result are defined in the view's definition. A list is the quickest way to scan through large numbers of results, a table gives you more information and allows inline editing. A tree view is useful for following the hierarchical linked items and following relational cross references, and the document view automatically scales to show your results in a simulated page format.
Once you have run a query, the exact details displayed for each item is controlled by the selected view. The toolbar in WorkBench lets you apply views for the query results and change the details seen. This does not change the result of the query, simply the data to be displayed.
Next to the drop down, for selecting a predefined view, is the View Details button. This allows you to customise the view or create a new one.
Here we can see a multi row view with row spans and selected attributes. The results of running this view can be seen below.
If you are happy with the view created you can save it for recall at a later date as described in the section above.
The query results show all the returned items, with the details chosen. To see a more detailed representation of the item, the coloured item icon is the quickest way to open the item in a form.
Forms are both supplied as defaults and can be tailored or built from scratch to meet your particular requirements. The image above shows the selection and display of the stakeholder requirement STA-2.
If the data originally imported through Document Loader was of a hierarchical nature, links between the parent requirement and its children will have been automatically created.
Alternatively the hierarchies between parents and children may have been built when selecting New Child or New Sibling or New Hierarchy. Links may also have been created by dragging and dropping or explicitly linking items of various types together. Running a query and displaying the results as a tree will allow you to quickly follow these cross references by expanding the tree nodes.
There are a set of standard item types within Cradle:
These can be extended by adding user-defined system notes which are a means to extend a Cradle PDB to encompass new types of information. Each type of item that you wish to store in a project is a type of system note. System note names can be up to 255 characters. Each type of system note has its own definition, consisting of the frames that can exist within system notes of the new type, and the allocation of project-wide category codes to system notes of the new type. For example:
A project can define any number of category codes. Each category code can optionally have a list of predefined values. Category codes are defined once and assigned to types of item in the database. When a user specifies a category value for a database item, any predefined values defined for the category’s category code are presented as a pick list for the user to choose from. Cradle supports two types of category code: single and multiple. Single category values are free form text, e.g. a category called Para Number may be set to 1-5 section 3 or it may support a selection from a predefined list, e.g. a category called Priority may be set to LOW or HIGH. Single-value categories can be formatted as text, time, date, integer, positive integer or real. Each item type can contain 32 categories providing efficient database indexes.
Calculated attributes are defined as a calculation of other attributes of the same item. This allows simple arithmetic calculations to be performed on individual items, where the inputs for the calculation are numeric attributes of the same item.
A calculated attribute is not stored in the PDB, but is calculated at runtime as and when required. It is possible to define multiple calculated attributes per item type in order of precedence. Calculations can be based on other calculations, provided that they are of higher precedence, i.e. they are defined before this calculation.
Each item can have a number of frames associated with it. Frame types can be defined to hold particular types of data, such as:
Database items and components within those items (frames) can be controlled by a user's team membership or individual assigned skills.
