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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.

December 2008 [Cradle 5.7]

How to Define Frames to Store Images in a Database

To store images inside items in a Cradle database, you need:

  • To define an attribute (a frame) to store the image
  • To load an image into this frame in a database item

To define an image frame (the first of these tasks), you can use one of the pre-defined frame types GIF or JPEG that are part of the 3SL-supplied default schema (and so is likely to have been used to initialise your project) and then define a new frame of one of these frame types. The steps are:

  1. Start WorkBench and login to your project as a user with PROJECT privilege
  2. Select Admin → Project Setup to display the Project Setup tool:
  3. Ensure that Options is set to Item Definitions and select the Item Types tab:
  4. Select the item type in which the frame is to be defined and select Frames… to display the Frame Setup dialogue:
  5. Enter a name for the new frame attribute, such as IMAGE, and click Add:
  6. Select the Type drop-down list to define the frame type for the new frame. The frame type defines the data type for the frame and also defines how data in the frame will be stored. Choose one of the pre-defined frame types GIF or JPEG to specify the type of data. Both of these frame types are set to store their data in the database:
  7. Click OK and then OK to leave Project Setup and click Yes in the Confirm Exit dialogue to confirm that the change should be written to the project schema

This sequence of steps has added a new frame called IMAGE (in this example) of type GIF (in this example) to the item type SR (in this example). This has not added any data to the database. It has simply created the opportunity for all items of the selected type to now have a GIF image stored inside their IMAGE frames in the database.

Note that it is not the frame type names GIF and JPEG that are special. These are simply two frame types that 3SL has provided (in the out-of-the-box schema files) that have been defined to store GIF and JPEG images: