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Cradle from 3SL, the complete Model Based Systems Engineering Toolsuite, specialising in requirements management, requirements capture, model based systems engineering and for systems engineering software, support and consultancy, the logical choice: Cradle from 3SL.

August 2010 [Cradle 6.3]

Improved PDF and Visio Integration

Cradle databases contains items whose attributes include frames that can each store or reference up to 1 TByte of any type of data. The type of data held in a frame is defined by the frame’s frame type. Some frame types are supplied with Cradle by 3SL, and you can define your own. Part of the frame type is the storage mechanism that defines whether the data in frames of this type will be held in the Cradle database, or referenced by Cradle as external files, at URLs (or equivalent references) or in external environments.

Frame Type Extensions

Cradle-6.3 has extended the options for referencing data held outside Cradle. Up to six parameters can be defined for any purpose that is relevant to the frame type. Values for these six parameters are held in each frame of the frame type. If you want to use any of these values, you can define labels that will be shown to the user when he/she is asked to supply values for the parameters as part of defining a frame for a particular item.

The values of these parameters are available as the new Command Directives $DATA1, $DATA2 … $DATA6 that can be used in the VIEW, EDIT, GET, SET or CHECK commands that you can define for a frame type.

Improved PDF Integration

This mechanism can be used to references to external PDF files to refer to a specific position on a specific page in the PDF document. This facility is provided in the new PDF LINK frame type provided by 3SL:

You can use the PDF LINK frame type for any frames in your items. Frames of this frame type will reference a specific position on a specific page in a PDF document. This allows a frame of type PDF LINK to refer to a very specific piece of data in a PDF file, rather than simply referencing the entire PDF file.

When you edit the properties of a frame of type PDF LINK, you are prompted to supply values for the position, page and file using the labels defined in the PDF LINK frame type definition:

When you view or edit a frame of type PDF LINK, the PDF file will be opened and moved to the specified page (if you have supplied one) and the page will be scrolled to the specified position (if you have supplied a position) if the underlying PDF viewer supports these facilities. Acrobat Reader supports moving to a specific page but does not support positioning within a page. Acrobat supports positioning moving to a page and positioning in a page.

Improved Visio Integration

The new facilities for frame types have also been used to allow a frame to reference specific symbol, or symbol group, on a specific page in a specific Visio file.

This new facility is provided using the new VISIO LINK frame type that is supplied by 3SL:

When you edit the properties of a frame of type VISIO LINK, you are prompted to supply values for the page, the symbol or group’s unique ID and the Visio file:

When you view or edit a frame of type VISIO LINK, the Visio file will be opened and moved to the specified page (if you have supplied one) and the specified symbol or group will be highlighted. If you don’t supply a page number then all pages in the Visio file will be searched to find the specified symbol or group.

The unique ID to be supplied is a rather strange value that is internal to the Visio file. It is not easy for users to get access to these numbers, so 3SL has supplied a small utility that is installed inside Visio as part of the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office that makes this process simple. When you start Visio, the Cradle plugin will be seen as the small icon:

The leftmost icon is used to display the unique ID for a selected symbol or group. This can be copied and pasted into the Cradle dialog shown above and stored with the frame.

The centre icon is used to populate a Cradle database with a set of items, each of which contains a link to a user-selected symbol or group in the Visio document. So, for example, if you have a Visio drawing containing 100 symbols, then you can use this facility to create 100 items in the Cradle database, each of which has a link to one of the Visio symbols.

This facility is extremely powerful when you have Visio drawings containing many symbols and you want to be able to create cross references within Cradle to individual symbols inside these drawings.

If you need more information, please contact 3SL or refer to the Cradle-6.3 documentation.