3SL Web-based newsletter for August 2005 [Cradle 5.2]

Project UIDs

The Cradle-5.2 release introduces support for Project Unique Identifiers (PUIDs). A PUID is an attribute in every piece of information in a project database:

Requirements
Events
Diagrams
Data definitions
Specifications
User defined information types (system notes)
Environment conditions
Environment loads
Input conditions
Load scenarios
State models
Threads
Change requests
Change tasks

When a new item is created, it is assigned a PUID. PUIDs are unique for all items in the database. PUIDs are not reused. A list of all PUIDs, and the item of information for each, is held in the database as a list, so that it is possible to translate between database items and PUIDs and vice versa.

All instances of an item (that is, all versions and drafts) have the same PUID.

One major use for PUIDs is to have a common method for identifying all items that are in a particular project baseline. Rather than separate lists of the items of each type that are in the baseline, a single list of PUIDs can be used.

To compare two baselines, simply compare the lists of PUIDs to see:

Which items have been added (new PUIDs in the list)
Which items have been removed (PUIDs missing from the list)
Which items have been changed (new instance of an item with a given PUID)

A project has some control over the PUIDs created in its database by specifying a Project ID (PID), a 6 character string that is specified when the project is created. Unlike the Project Code, the PID does not have to be unique across all projects managed by a Cradle Database Server (CDS). This allows an organisation to have several databases for a project, each sharing a common PID.

Each Cradle database has an automatically generated Database ID (DID) which is guaranteed to be unique for all databases generated on any host machine, so it will be unique between CDSs.

The combination of the DID and PID is guaranteed to be unique between projects created on different Cradle systems on different Cradle Database Servers (CDSs).

PUIDs are supported throughout the Cradle-5.2 release. This includes:

Displaying PUIDs in Toolset views
Access to PUIDs in Toolset editors’ Status dialogues
Being able to display PUIDs in WorkBench views and forms
Displaying PUIDs in Web Access lists and forms
Performing imports and exports based on PUIDs
Performing queries based on PUIDs in Toolset, WorkBench and Web Access
Optionally importing PUIDs or reassigning PUIDs when importing
Generating reports of PUIDs and their corresponding item, and vice versa
Getting PUIDs through the Cradle API

In general, the PUID facilities are transparent, so if PUIDs are not of interest to you, then ignore them!

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