Cradle WRK

The Cradle-WRK module allows tailored views of the Cradle database to be created for different groups of project engineers and external users. It provides WorkBench, a customisable tool for both browsing and manipulating Cradle databases.

WorkBench is for groups who benefit from a tailored environment; to provide a view of just what they want to see, in the way they want to see it, or to provide a simplified overview for project management.

WorkBench displays data in Explorer style trees, in editable tables, in lists, and in fully customisable forms. All display modes are customised by point-and-click interfaces to control the attributes displayed. These view definitions are shared across the project.

A master tree shows the full project database with cross references shown by indentation, and provides access to all definitions, user accounts and the project schema for suitably authorised users.

WorkBench sessions contain panels each with a set of items selected by user-defined filters, which can also be shared. The layout of panels, filters and views is contained in a session, which can be pre-defined for each user community.

Items can be viewed or edited in lists, forms and spreadsheet-like tables. Cross references are shown as hierarchies, can be edited and manipulated, and created with drag and drop. Drag and drop can also be used to open items and apply filters or views.

Customised forms allow any parts of items to be displayed, including diagrams. All relationships between diagrams and symbol definitions can be explored.

Item displays can be exported into HTML and Word for reporting and publication.

Compliancy and traceability tables and impact analyses can be easily defined and displayed with other views.

WorkBench is fully integrated with all desktop tools, including Word, to view any type of data in database items’ frames.

WorkBench provides customisable views of, and access to, project data. WorkBench is a flexible and powerful data visualisation tool that provides a wide range of data access mechanisms and data presentation techniques.

WorkBench provides a master tree through which all aspects of the project’s data can be browsed and navigated, subject to the user’s access controls. Individual items can be opened in user-defined or project-defined forms. Any number of forms can be defined for each type of project information. Depending on a user’s access rights, the form will provide read-only or read-write access to this data. If the item contains binary data, such as embedded Word documents or externally referenced Excel spreadsheets, this data is accessed when WorkBench launches the external application appropriately. Any changes made to such binary data (if allowed by the user’s access rights) is automatically uploaded back into the project database.

Any number of queries can be defined and run to select items, based on any combination of their identities, their attributes, their contents, their positions within hierarchies and/or the existence (or non-existence) of links to/from the item and other items in the database, optionally by cross references of specific types, or of any type in a specific link group.

The results of these queries can be rendered either as simple lists, or as tables or as trees. The set of attributes of the retrieved items that are displayed is controlled by a view. Any number of views can be defined for each item type, and changed by the user.

Lists are a convenient means of presenting large volumes of information. Tables contain rows for the items and columns for the attributes. Subject to a user’s access rights, all cells are editable, through fields, scrollable text windows, combo boxes or buttons to launch external applications (such as embedded Word documents). Tables can show arbitrarily many levels of cross referenced items, as nested rows within the table. All of these tabular views can be exported to RTF (for Word) and HTML (for Excel and web browsers) with controllable table styles. Trees can be used to navigate through the relationships between data, drilling down through the levels of linked items. If a user’s access rights permit, cross references can be created through drag and drop, and the attributes of cross references can be edited directly through the tree.

You can restrict which queries, views and forms are accessible to each user, or each class of user. You can also control whether users can create personal queries, views and so on, and whether they can modify the shared user-group or project-wide definitions.

You can subdivide the WorkBench window into panes, and display any number of queries and forms in each pane. Panes can be arranged next to each other to present different views of the same data, or views of related groups of data.

You can configure sessions, which define the set of panes for the WorkBench UI, the queries to run in each pane, and the views to be used for these queries. Users can select a session when they log-in, or can be forced to use a specific session.

Using sessions allows WorkBench to present tailored views of the project data that are tailored to the needs of different user groups. For example, the risk managers can have a pre-configured view of the risk register, the interface managers could start with a view of the interface list, team leaders could start with a progress status view, while the requirements team could start with a view of the work-in-progress system requirements.

Specific sessions could also be created for the customer, and for other stakeholder groups. These sessions would limit which views can be used, which queries can be run and, if any editing is to be allowed, which attributes of the items are to be shown in read-write fields in the tables and forms.