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January 2012 [Cradle 6.5.1]

How to Create Pivot Tables

In the demonstration database DEMO supplied with all Cradle systems there is a set of user requirements each of which have several attributes including ITEM STATUS that records the status of each user requirement (agreed, accepted and so on) and REQ CAT that records the type of each user requirement (original, derived, informational and so on). These attributes can be used in a pivot table.

Login to the demonstration project DEMO as the user REQMAN, password REQMAN and select Metrics… from the Tools pull-down menu to display the Metric Details dialog:

Select Add to define a new metric element:

Select the Automatic scope query Req – All from the Query: drop-down list to define the set of items (the user requirements in this case) whose attributes are to be analysed:

Each metric element performs an operation on the items found by the query, typically a calculation based on the number of items found by the query or on the values of numeric attributes inside these items. In this case, choose Pivot Table from the Operation: pull-down menu:

Now select the ITEM STATUS and REQ CAT attributes from the Value: fields to specify which attributes are to be analysed in the pivot table:

Finally, choose a view from the Show using view: drop-down list. This view is used to display lists of items when users expand the cells in the pivot table. Choose the Automatic scope view Req – Details:

Select New to run the metric. Cradle runs the specified query to find the user requirements and then analyses the user requirements to calculate how many user requirements have each possible combination of values for the ITEM STATUS and REQ CAT attributes. The results are shown in a new tab in the WorkBench UI:

The pivot table shows a lot of information, such as:

  • There are no user requirements whose ITEM STATUS is CLOSED
  • There are no user requirements whose REQ CAT is unset, all requirements have a REQ CAT value
  • There are 7 user requirements whose ITEM STATUS is AGREED and whose REQ CAT is Original

Select the cell containing the 7 above user requirements, and a new tab is opened containing a list of these 7 user requirements, shown with the Req – Details view specified in the pivot table’s metric definition:

To publish this information to CSV, HTML or RTF, select Publish…, select the desired options such as:

and select OK:

In this example, the metric is published using the style Blues, as shown in the Style: drop-down list. The default value for the style used when reports, such as this metric, are published, is a personal preference. You can set this personal preference by choosing Preferences… from the Edit pull-down menu and select the Reports user preferences group:

If you want to save this metric definition, select Save As:

then enter a name and scope for the new metric definition and select OK.

You can reference pivot tables in reports and in the phase hierarchy. You can generate them from the c_table command line utility. You can also generate them in documents produced by the Document Publisher tool.