Plug-Ins

Microsoft Word and Excel

Cradle provides plug-in modules for Microsoft Word and Excel. These are loaded when Cradle is installed on PCs that have Word or Excel 2003, 2007 or 2010 already installed on them:

The plug-ins provide facilities to capture data from documents and spreadsheets into items in the database. You can capture:

• All selected paragraphs into a single item
• Each selected paragraph into a separate item
• Each table row into a separate item
• Each spreadsheet row into a separate item

Each plug-in has a CRADLE Capture… dialog through which you log-in to your Project Database (PDB). This loads the project schema into the plug-in so you can capture into any type of item defined by the project, and select attribute values from combo boxes. Auto-increment facilities are provided to capture sets of items at once. You can keep the plug-ins’ windows active whilst manipulating Word and Excel, so you can perform a series of captures without repeatedly logging-in to a project.

When capturing from tables or spreadsheets, you define a mapping between columns and attributes of the database items that specify where each columns data should go. You can also ignore columns.

You can use the Word and Excel plug-ins cyclically, to either store new information in the database, or to merge information from a Word document into existing data. This allows you to, for example:

• Capture information from a Word document
• Modify the information in Cradle
• Export the information as a Word document or table
• Modify the information in Word
• Merge the changes back into the Cradle database

Microsoft Project

Most projects have a formal project plan by which their work can be planned and the progress of this work can be monitored. A project plan will typically divide the project's work into activities which can be grouped into a hierarchy that is usually called a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). At its simplest, the WBS is a hierarchical description of the work that is required to complete a project.

The use of, or interest in, a WBS may not be confined to the group that maintains the project plan. Often a project will want to have a representation of the project plan that is accessible to the systems engineering data, so that:

• Parts of the project plan can be assigned to people working in the systems engineering environment
• Individuals can have task lists prepared for them from the project plan
• Information used by, or generated by, the activities in the project plan can be linked to the activities in the plan
• Updates to the project plan can be made from within the systems engineering environment

Cradle provides an interface to Microsoft Project. This interface supports:

• Schedules that are held as files and within Microsoft Project Server
• Multiple schedules per Cradle project
• Loading a schedule into Cradle to create a hierarchical WBS
• Loading the time-related data associated with a schedule into the WBS in Cradle
• Updating a WBS in Cradle from a changed schedule without damaging any other Cradle data held in the WBS
• Opening Microsoft Project from Cradle so as to display the schedule activity associated with a WBS item in Cradle
• Sending data from the WBS in Cradle back into Microsoft Project to update the schedule
• Defining how the interface will interact with your schema
• A mechanism to associate one or more users with a WBS item
• A mechanism to produce task lists for users

Microsoft Visio

The Cradle Visio capture utility allows a Cradle database to be populated with placeholder items for some or all of the symbols or groups on a Visio drawing.

When the utility is run it scans every page of the specified Visio drawing and produces a list of names of the top-level groups and un-grouped symbols in a list of checkboxes (a group or top-level ungrouped symbol that does not have a name will not appear in the list). You can select which of the entries in this list are to be captured into the Cradle database. If the Visio drawing is read-only, then this list is filtered to only contain those symbols or groups that have a unique ID.

If you select one or more of the entries in this list, then the utility allows you to:

1. Specify a set of Cradle login details, containing username, password, project code and LDAP ignore flag
2. Specify an item type to be created within Cradle, which will be either the pre-defined requirement item type or a system note type
3. If the selected item type is not auto-numbered:

1. Specify the starting number and increment to be used for the identities (the Number attribute) of the items to be created in the database
2. Specify whether any existing items may be overwritten

4. Specify the name of a frame which is to contain a reference to the symbol or group, this frame must have a frame type that:

1. Is a binary frame whose storage mechanism is not In PDB
2. Must have VIEW and/or EDIT commands that contain the c_visiolink utility

When you have supplied this information, the utility will:

1. Login to Cradle
2. If the Visio drawing has been opened read-write, then create a unique ID for every entry that the user has selected in the Visio symbol/group list that does not have a unique ID and save the resulting modified Visio file
3. Create a set of items of the specified item type, one for each entry that you have selected in the Visio symbol/group list (if the Visio drawing is read-only, then this list will only contain symbols/groups that have a unique ID), and in each item that has been created:

1. Set the item name to the name of the top-level symbol or group
2. Store in the specified binary frame:

• The pathname of the Visio drawing as the pathname
• The page number in the Visio drawing as the first data item (corresponding to $DATA1 in the VIEW and EDIT commands in the frame type)
• The symbol/group ID in the Visio drawing as the second data item (corresponding to $DATA2 in the VIEW and EDIT commands in the frame type)

Licensing

Plug-ins utilise the following Cradle licence:

• CR-PDM - Project Data Management