Cradle-5.3 Release

3SL is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Cradle-5.3, the new major release of our requirements management and systems engineering environment. Cradle-5.3 is a full product release, and is accompanied by new documentation and related materials.

Cradle-5.3 includes the enhancements from the Cradle-5.2.1 and Cradle-5.2.2 updates to Cradle-5.2 that we released in October and November 2005 respectively. It also provides a number of other enhancements that are specific to the Cradle-5.3 release. The descriptions of Cradle-5.3 in this newsletter and in its Release Notes include all of the enhancements from Cradle-5.2 onwards, highlighting those that are specific to Cradle-5.3.

Our website has been updated to allow the download of Cradle-5.3 as well as the previous Cradle releases.

The major elements of the Cradle-5.3 release are:

1. Multi-value category codes
2. Times in timestamps and other database changes
3. Project scheme metadata
4. Data definition bitfields
5. Document Publisher UI and template storage
6. New web-based Startup Guide

and from the Cradle-5.2.2 update:

1. Text selection in WorkBench change history entries
2. New Linked Item feature in Cradle web UIs

and from the Cradle-5.2.1 update:

1. Extensions to import options
2. API extensions

Concurrent modelling improvements

Database Compatibility

Cradle-5.3 has a new format for its project databases. If you upgrade to Cradle-5.3 you must convert all your project databases to the new format. A converter is supplied with the release that will perform the conversions for you. The Cradle-5.3 installers automatically detect the need to run this converter, to ensure that the upgrade is as simple as possible.

It is also possible to upgrade to a new release by creating a new Cradle installation with new project databases in new directories and using exports and imports to move data between the databases of the old and new versions. With this approach, you could use the new version and its databases, or you could revert to the old Cradle version and its databases. These two sets of databases would initially have the same contents, but this would remain true only for so long as data is not changed in one set that is not also changed in the other.

Customers who adopt this approach use a procedure similar to:

• Export data from the databases in the previous release
• Install the new release
• Create new projects in the new release
• Import the data from the export files into the new databases

If you are updating to Cradle-5.3 from Cradle-5.2, or one of its updates, then you can use either approach. That is, you can either convert Cradle-5.2 databases to Cradle-5.3 or you can export from Cradle-5.2 and import into Cradle-5.3. We recommend that you use the conversion approach, but the choice is yours.

However, if you are updating to Cradle-5.3 from Cradle-5.1 (or one of its updates) or an earlier release then you must read the next section very carefully.

Upgrading from Cradle-5.1 or Earlier Releases

This section ONLY applies to those customers who are upgrading to Cradle-5.3 directly from Cradle-5.1 (or one of its updates) or from an earlier version, such as Cradle-5.0 (or one of its updates) or Cradle-4.0U329.

If you have not used change histories (edit histories) in the earlier version of Cradle, then you can still use the export-and-import approach to the upgrade to Cradle-5.3 described in the previous section, if you wish.

However, if you have used change histories (edit histories) in Cradle-5.1 (or any of its updates), or Cradle-5.0 (or any of its updates), or in Cradle-4.0U329 then you must use the converter to upgrade to Cradle-5.2.

The reason for this is that at Cradle-5.2 we changed the way change histories (edit histories) are stored. Prior to version 5.2, they were stored as events in the project Configuration Log used by the Cradle Configuration Management System (CMS). From version 5.2 they are stored in CHANGE HISTORY frames in the items in the database. Therefore, simply exporting and importing will not convert the change history information from the Configuration Log to CHANGE HISTORY frames, and so if you export from one of these old versions and import into Cradle-5.3, then you will lose your change histories when the database items are viewed through Cradle-5.3.

Toolset Fonts

Cradle-5.3 does not include any changes to the set of fonts used by the Cradle Toolset from those that were supplied with Cradle-5.2.

If you upgradeto Cradle-5.3 from Cradle-5-1 (or any of its updates) or an earlier version, then you must apply the new fonts supplied with Cradle-5.3. If you are upgrading from Cradle-5.2 (or one of its updates), then you do not need to apply the fonts supplied with Cradle-5.3.

Must I Install Cradle-5.3?

Cradle-5.3 contains all the enhancements and bug fixes from the Cradle-5.2.1 and Cradle-5.2.2 updates to Cradle-5.2 and a set of further enhancements. It represents a substantial improvement over Cradle-5.2.

We would like you to use Cradle-5.3 in preference to Cradle-5.2 or an earlier version. That is why we released it!

If you are currently using Cradle-5.2, there is no immediate need for you to upgrade to Cradle-5.3. 3SL will continue to support Cradle-5.2 and its updates ( Cradle-5.2.1 and Cradle-5.2.1) until the next major version of Cradle is released.

However, if you are currently using Cradle-5, or Cradle-4, we strongly urge you to upgrade to Cradle-5.3 because:

• You will see some very dramatic extensions and improvements
• 3SL no longer supports these releases

Mixing Cradle-5.3 and Earlier Releases

You cannot mix Cradle-5.3 with any earlier release of Cradle. That is, if you decide to install Cradle-5.3anywhere, then you must install it everywhere.

Specifically:

• Cradle-5.3 servers will not respond to Cradle-5.2 or earlier clients
• Cradle-5.3 clients will not be serviced by Cradle-5.2 or earlier servers

These incompatibilities are failsafe. That is, if you should accidentally fail to upgrade a client to Cradle-5.3, then starting that client will not have any adverse effect on the operation of Cradle-5.3, since the Cradle-5.3 servers will simply ignore connection attempts from clients of any previous version.

Downloading Cradle-5.3

All Cradle-5.3 download files for Windows and UNIX in our website were added to our website on 5 th January 2006.

For Windows, the file to download is: Cradle53_Setup.exe

For UNIX, download the boot and core.Z filesets, and also download the fileset for your architecture:

• hp700_10 or hp800_10 for HP HP-UX 10.20 or later
• ibm4 for IBM AIX 4.2
• ibm5 for IBM AIX 5.1 or later
• linux-ia32 for all compatible versions and types of Linux
• sparcs2 for Sun Solaris 2.5.1 or later
• win32pc for Windows executables hosted on a UNIX server

So, if you are running on UNIX, you will need to download a minimum of 3 filesets.

If you are running a UNIX server that provides executables for multiple platforms, then you will need to download boot, core.Z and all the filesets for the platforms provided by your server.

If you are running a mixed UNIX and Windows environment, such as UNIX servers and Windows clients, then you will need to download the Windows self-extracting executable and all UNIX filesets that are needed for your environment.

3SL has a dedicated 2 Mbit/sec Internet connection which means that even the largest of these files can be downloaded in 16 minutes. However, we also provide a mirror site, which provides even faster downloads.