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Parametrics in Document Publisher

Parametrics can be very useful in Document Publisher. It uses a question mark ? as a marker to Document Publisher that this is an option and needs to be filled/selected by the user.

It can allow users to set the Identity/key of a single item or more to be output. This can be used in a hierarchy or with a single item type. Parametrics can also be used to set different properties and options in filters.

Single Parametrics

Using a single Parametric (?) allows a user to publish a template many times but use a different item Identity or Key each time. Note: Using a single parametric in several places in the template will always use the same item identity or key each time.

A parametric can be used at the database/top level or at the field level to set the items to be published. At the top level the parametric is entered for the Identity or Key.

Single Parametric set at Database level
Single Parametric set at Database level
Specify Key dialog
A popup for a user to set the Key(s) at a database level item.

They can also be used in a filter for field to set or restrict the items to be output.

Using a category to detemine if a field tag is output.
Using a category to detemine if a field tag is output.

In this case the Requirement attribute of Identity will only be output if its Item Status is set to Accepted.

This allows the user to set the Item Status Option.
This allows the user to set the Item Status Option.

As you can see below, only items with a status of Accepted have both the Identity and Key output for the Requirements.

Small excerpt of the items output
Small excerpt of the items output

Named Parametrics

Using a Named Parametric (?named) means a user can have several different parametrics throughout the template and each can be set at time of publishing. So for example the user can set one named parametric for output based on one option of category (e.g. Agreed) and then later in the template use a different named parametric to output based on a different category option (e.g. Rejected).

Named Parameters for 2 different Paragraph Group Tags
Named Parameters for 2 different Paragraph Group Tags

During publishing a popup will allow the user to select Agreed for the first Paragraph Group popup:

Named Parametric for Status 1
Named Parametric for Status 1

They then can select Rejected for the second Paragraph Group popup:

The second popup to select a different Status
The second popup to select a different Status

The published output will then show the 2 different outputs in the same document.

Output using the above options
Output using the above options

These named parameters can even be used in several places within the template. The user may want to show the Agreed Requirements and System Requirements in one document. As both item types use the same category (Item Status in our Demo) then the same named parametric can be used for both item types.

Using Named parametrics for both Requirements and System Requirements
Using Named parametrics for both Requirements and System Requirements
Output using the same Named Parameters twice
Output using the same Named Parameters twice

In the above screenshot, the 2 named Parametrics have been used for Requirements and System Requirements and the output shows all the Agreed items but that there are no Rejected System Requirements.

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Do I Need a New Security Code when Moving Machines?

When do I need a New Cradle Security Code?

We are often asked “Do I need a new security code?”. Obviously, if you are wanting to upgrade from one major release to another e.g. 6.n to 7.n  a new code will be needed. You would also need a code from one Cradle point version to another, for example Cradle-7.2 to 7.3.

shows the contents of a configuration file
Configuration File

 

The other case is when moving your Cradle Database Server (CDS). If you have changed, or are planning to change your server there are two main points to consider and these are discussed below.

Has Your Machine’s MAC Address Changed?

Yes

If the MAC address on your new machine is different from you old machine, then yes, you will need a new Cradle Security Code. Please see the section below on how to request a new code.

NO

If your machine’s MAC address has not changed then you do not need a new security code.  Your existing code will continue to work on the new machine.

How to Request a New Cradle Security Code?

C:\Program Files\Cradle\bin\exe\windows\c_hostid.exe
c_hostid.exe

If you require a new security code please send an email to support@threesl.com containing the MAC address of you new machine and the Cradle Version you require a code for. You can run the Cradle utility Host ID from the start menu or C:\Program Files\Cradle\bin\exe\windows\c_hostid.exe

How to Install a New Security Code?

Once you have received a new, please refer to this blog post or this page in the Cradle Help for more information on how to install it on your new machine.

 

 

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October 2017 Newsletter

October – The ‘8th’ month of the year….

Calendar - based on image from pexels.com
Everything can Change

Octo is 8 after all, from Latin octo, Greek okto. In Romulus’s calendar, when the year started in March, it was the 8th month. However, given they only had 10 months, they also had around 50 days of ‘winter’ that didn’t really have a name. For a time we then ended up with 13 months, but in the final Julian system, only January and February remained inserted at the beginning of the year.  Roman emperors were honoured by renaming a couple of months and we are where we are today.
“OK, what’s the point”, we hear you cry. It’s that nothing is really stable, something currently taken for granted (months of the year) has a long complex history. So do many projects. They start off in one direction with one set of assumptions, constraints and regulations and then……BANG! A change is dropped on your desk which changes the original assumptions, impacts the design, has repercussions for tests and so on.
Taking a baseline when things are relatively stable is a good way to record the status-quo in your project at any one time. Lock down things as they stand so you have a stable footing against which to document and measure change. Check at what point Mercedonius (month of wages) was retired.  Use formal Change Requests and Change Tasks to record why an alteration is needed. (Because Julius said reform, because Augustus needs to be honoured). Use the trace facilities of cross references and suspect integrity highlighting, in Cradle, to see what impact a change in the chain will have.

New Customers

Welcome to all our new customer’s this quarter.  Especially Public Health England who have recently selected Cradle for a major operational plan.

Cradle® has been selected by Public Health England (PHE) to manage the definition and fulfilment of requirements for its Science Hub programme. This £400 million project will design and build a world class national public health science hub and headquarters in Harlow that will bring together personnel from PHE’s Porton, Colindale and central  London sites. The PHE Harlow site is scheduled to be fully operational in 2024.

Cradle is a requirements management, enterprise architecture and systems  engineering tool that integrates the entire lifecycle of development,  organisational and infrastructure projects that use agile or phase-based methods. Cradle is an ideal solution for procurement projects for ITT generation, bid assessment and contract management, by providing  traceability between a managed, configuration-controlled multi-user database and all external source and published documents.

Mark Walker, Director of 3SL said:

“We are delighted that PHE has chosen  Cradle for this important infrastructure and reorganisation programme. We welcome the opportunity for a long-term partnership with PHE and confident that Cradle will make a significant contribution to the successful realisation of the new PHE Harlow site.”

If you would like to feature your company in the 3SL newsletter, please drop us a line at social-customer@threesl.com

Cradle 7.3.1

If you want the extra facilities or small bug fixes in Cradle 7.3.1,  you can download it from the website and install new clients and server across your organisation. There is no need to obtain an additional security code for this point release upgrade. Those on single user versions of Cradle 7.3 can also take advantage of the upgrade. If you have any problems please email or call the Support  Department support@threesl.com +44 1229 838867 or contact your local distributor.

Banking Changes

Piggy bank
Banking Changes

There are some changes afoot for those that deal with 3SL financially.

As we mentioned last month, if you do business with 3SL you may need to update some of the banking details. We’ll keep you posted here.

Social Media

Twitter

Celebrating question mark
Celebration Question

We had some good suggestions last month when we asked (@MadeinBritainGB) how we should celebrate our upcoming 30th birthday, here at 3SL towers. If you have any other ideas, if you have celebrated a company anniversary, either DM or ‘Reply‘ to the above tweet, or email social-customer@threesl.com

Hints of the Month

Have a width and a length, the area is easy, but why not just get Cradle to work it out for you? Short video on setting up calculations.

“Oops didn’t mean to delete that!” Here’s how to recover items.

A ‘Subject Item‘, what it is and how to publish it in Document Publisher.

You can read Hints & Tips in the 3SL Blog.

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Ada Lovelace Day 2017

Celebrate a British ‘Programming’ Hero

Ada Lovelace Day

The second Tuesday of October (Ada Lovelace Day 2017) sees the celebration of women’s achievements in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths).

Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace is known for her work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. By taking maths beyond calculations to create algorithms to run on general machines. To coin a phrase “One of the first computer programmers”

Ada is a structured high-level programming language designed in the late seventies and takes its name from the countess.

ASGs are used to provide a visual representation of the program units (packages, tasks and subprograms) in an Ada software system. You can draw these in Cradle, and of course link them to other Cradle components from requirements to tests.

example ASG
Ada Structure Graph (ASG)

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2017 why not  search for “Ada Programming Language”  or draw an ASG! For more information on ASGs see the Cradle help.

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International Noodle Day 2017

Whatever you Carbohydrate Requirement – There’s a Noodle for You!

On International Noodle Day 2017, we celebrate this humble food universally eaten worldwide.  There, are of course, variants, rice, wheat, eggs in various proportions, wholemeal noodles with a higher fibre content and noodles made from courgettes for people who want the convenience of a noodle without the carbs.

Now trying to put a product slant on Noodle Day may appear tricky. We’ve opted for pointing out that Cradle comes in many variants too! From Single user Requirements Management to Multi User Enterprise Product Lifecycle design and control.

So whether today you choose to have them from a pot with boiling water as a lunch time snack or coated in sesame oil and chilli with chicken and shredded pak-choi for your evening meal. Enjoy a Noodle today! #InternationalNoodleDay

Different Views

Now whether you see a Noodle as a type of Pasta or Pasta as a type of Noodle is a topic for debate. World Pasta Day celebrates the multi variants of this card dish. These opinions can be seen as different  viewpoints on the same data (the flour / egg / oil in the recipe). Unlike the traditional classic functional modelling, where the diagram is king, in SysML data is prime. SysML diagrams allow you to show different views on the same data, unlike classic models they don’t need to tell the whole story or balance in the same way.  Different user groups may choose to focus on different aspects of the same project and have the same underlying stereotypes, but offer a different top level perspective in their diagram.

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Teaching Requirements Management and Systems Engineering to Tomorrow’s Engineers

Academic Discount – 3SL Supporting UK Engineering

Get Students – ‘Industry Ready’ Designers

3SL are the Proud Suppliers of Cradle, and recognise the importance to good engineering. We also recognise that when students move into industry it is important that they have the skills necessary to make an impact and hit the ground running.  This is why we are offering copies of our Requirements Management and Systems Engineering tool at a vastly reduced cost under a special academic discount.

Laptop, pencil, paper, notes
System Design

We would like to give your students the ability to use industry leading MBSE (Model Based Systems Engineering) tools in Functional Analysis and Design such as Yourdon, or  SysML  (Systems Modelling Language). These link together with the  requirements, constraints, risks and test-cases to produce a fully holistic design. This process is understood by engineers worldwide. Cradle is a fully tailorable cradle-to-grave design management tool.

Cradle Enterprise a Full Multi-user Multi-discipline Design Tool

Whilst you can purchase copies of Cradle that support many aspects of the engineering lifecycle for as little as £249 per seat,  these are not multi user and have some restrictions. In order to collaborate and teach and make use of all the features users would generally install an Enterprise system. They would then licence each of the features they use for their business. Whilst these licences are fully floating, the users share some resources reducing their costs.

Massive Discount –  Save Over £20,000

five pound notes
Discount

We would like to offer any academic department who wish to teach Requirements Management or Systems Engineering techniques to their students ten FREE sets of licences for EVERY module in Cradle. This discount for 10 academic licences gives you a product normally costing approximately £22,200 pounds* All we ask is you pay an annual maintenance cost of £1K.

Demonstration

You can download a trial version of Cradle here. This will give you a 14 day trial. You can request further details about Cradle by contacting salesdetails@threesl.com You can book a Webinar through our website here.

Terms And Conditions

Continue reading “Teaching Requirements Management and Systems Engineering to Tomorrow’s Engineers”

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Multiple Data Cells – Document View

Heading Styles in Document View

New Cradle 7.3.1 Feature (Multiple Data Cells – Document View)

We’ve updated Document View in Cradle to allow triggering by content of Multiple Data Cells.

Document View is a style that gives a quick output from a query in a style akin to a document with heading levels being shown in different styles. These are triggered when the hierarchical attribute is present in the first cell.

Multiple Data Cells allow the combination of data values within one View Cell. If your Multiple Data Cell includes the hierarchical element, its Document Style behaviour will now be the same as if it were the element itself.

In the screen-shot below the Key is shown in the top view and then as part of a Multiple Data Cell in the lower part.

 

Showing the dialogs and results to use multiple data cell in document view
Multiple Cell in Document Style

Output to Hard Copy

When there is no need to create a full formal document through Document Publisher, it is possible to publish the view to HTML or RTF quite easily. Simply ‘right click’ on the text in the view and select  Publish Table…. and then ensure that the option Use document-style fonts is selected.

Dialog and result of publishing table with document style fonts
Publish Table – Document Style Fonts

As can be seen in the screen-shot the multiple data cells – Document View Fonts  are preserved in the output. Now you can use whichever printer is attached to your system to produce the hard copy from the text in your browser or the RTF file, or save a tree and email the resultant file where appropriate.

Views

Cradle Views are a simple yet flexible way to arrange your tabular query output. To learn more see the help section on Views.

Related Articles

It is possible to copy the text from a multiple cell to your clipboard for use elsewhere.

 

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Opportunities at 3SL

Opportunities / Jobs with 3SL, producers of Cradle

As an SME 3SL are interested in multi-disciplined individuals to join our team. We value team players who are able to lend a hand to many areas of the business in addition to their core activity. As such, rather than provide a specific job role, we would like to outline the areas that are of most interest to us. For the right individual we will consider creating a suitable role. For more about the opportunities working with 3SL, visit threesl.com/opportunities

Logo and Opportunities strap
Opportunities with 3SL, producers of Cradle
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Can I create an item in Cradle remotely?

Web Access can be used from around the Globe.

Provided you have set access to the web server, if you can connect a browser you can certainly create an item in Cradle remotely.

This video shows how simple it is.

  1. click the New Item icon
  2. fill in the details
  3. add additional information in the item opened in a form
  4. see the item in the database query.

Many tasks can be performed through Cradle’s Web Access.

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Cradle-7.3.1 Released

New Cradle Release

We are pleased to announce the release of  Cradle-7.3.1, with some useful new features and some fixes. We’ll be sending announcement e-mails to all customers with active maintenance, and e-mails to the customers whose enhancements have been added, and whose reported bugs have been fixed.

Cradle-7.3.1
Cradle 7.3.1

Some of the new features in this release are:

  • Excel Capture Utility, allow auto numbered items to be created when a column is mapped to the Identity attribute and the identity is blank.
  • Update Windows builds to support Microsoft .NET Framework v4.7.
  • Performance improvement in Doc Viewer control.
  • Web Access, for a parametric query using category picklists, display the picklist in the parametric UI.
  • Allow multi-value view cell containing ID, Key etc., to trigger heading behaviour in Document View
  • Improve Schema Report – Coloursets.

Upgrading

If you upgrade to Cradle-7.3.1 anywhere, you must upgrade everywhere, the server and all clients. Visit the download area.

If you are upgrading from a version prior to Cradle-7.3 you will require a Security Code. Contact our Support Department to get your new Security Code.

Customers who purchased a single-user Cradle-7.3 product can also apply this new release.