Cradle WEBP

Cradle-WEBP module allows you to publish sections of your Cradle databases as fully hyperlinked websites.

Publishing a website allows users to browse project data in whatever way suits them. It is often preferable to traditional documents, which are linear, and cannot meet all users’ needs. Instead of printing the same data in different document styles, a hyperlinked website can often meet all user expectations.

Being read-only, websites can be distributed on CD-ROM, and as a database snapshot, are immune from accidental changes.

User defined criteria specify the item types, and items of these types, to publish from the database. The website has a main page, a table for each type of item being published (with user defined attributes in the tables’ columns) and one page for each item of each type. These pages can be generated into a separate directory, for easy assembly into a larger website. All formats are controlled by user-defined HTML templates.

Diagrams are published as SVG and are hyperlinked to other diagrams and symbol definitions. All links in the database appear as hyperlinks in the generated website. Each item is published with hyperlinked tables of its links to all other project data.

Different baselines, or work-in-progress, can be published to separate websites, for comparison between approved and current activities. By including URL attributes from the database in your layouts, the generated website will link into web components from other tools, or into the Internet or your existing intranet.

The Web Publisher can be used throughout the project as a means to disseminate project information to stakeholders, reviewers and customers who do not have access to Cradle tools, and do not (or are not to be given, or cannot be given) web-based access directly into the Cradle project database through Cradle’s web access facilities of the Cradle-WEBA module.

Any part of the work-in-progress or baselined content of a project’s database can be written into a fully hyperlinked website with a format and style of your choosing. The resulting website can be either published on your company or project intranet, or could be written onto CD and distributed to groups who do not have electronic access to project data. Such CDs can form a valuable part of the physical project deliverables to the customer.

You can develop multiple web publishing templates, perhaps to present summary and in-depth views of the project data, or to provide overview or detailed views, or to provide restricted views that mask sensitive information from groups without a need to see such data.

Different templates could be used to prepare different CDs for each of a set of contractors, or to prepare sets of CDs for multiple groups of several companies, each group competing for a separate sub-contract. This method allows each group to have just enough visibility of the appropriate subset of the project data, in an easy-to-use form. By being automatically generated by the Cradle Web Publisher, these CD distributions can be updated whenever needed, with minimum effort and complete accuracy.

Deployment of these published websites into the company or project intranet is a valuable way to share information throughout the project. The Web Publisher allows recently updated information to be generated separately, allowing recent changes to be highlighted to the project.

The Web Publisher allows on-the-fly manipulation of the website, for example to manipulate URLs when generating to pre-production or full production release websites.

By containing appropriate sets of project information (as chosen by you), these websites allow customers and stakeholders to browse through the project data in whatever manner is most convenient to them. They can, in effect, answer their own questions, a valuable asset as it can often obviate the need for further documents which, by their very nature, are each intrinsically a means to present answers to a specific set of questions posed by a specific target audience.

By being intrinsically static, they also have the benefit of being unalterable, and as such are an ideal mechanism for presenting information that is under CCB (change control board) control.