Baselines are a mechanism in Configuration Management Systems to protect formally reviewed and approved information from modification. It is a named repository for the definitive state of a system at a specific point in time to which only read-only access is permitted. A succession of baselines are created over the life of a project, each containing information from an increasing subset of the phases in a project.
In certain situations, it may be necessary to stop a baseline from being closed if a condition has not been met. For example, if items have been registered in the baseline but items that are linked have not been.
Having this option set will ensure that all relevant data will appear in your completed baseline.
Open and Closed Baselines
Setting the Baseline Item Integrity Check
To set this option, navigate to the Configuration Management options in Project Setup and tick the Baseline Item Integrity Check option:
Baseline Option in Project Setup
You also have the ability to set a rule for the direction of the link/dependence:
All items linked to baselined items are also baselined (default option)
Baselined items’ source items are also baselined
Baselined items’ destination items are also baselined
Exclusions
You can also exclude item types or link types from being bound by this setting:
Excluded item and link types
Failing the Check
If any of the checks fail, an error message will be shown with a report showing the items that caused the close baseline operation to fail:
The easiest description of a baseline is, a holding area for information owned by the project, i.e. how the database/items were at a particular point in time. There are both items and cross references in a baseline. The more cross references you have the larger the files will be. This means that if you do have many Baselines, you could find significant space being used on the server.
Are Baselines Taking Up a Lot of Server Space?
In our latest release of Cradle 7.4, cross references are separated from the other files when a baseline is closed. The cross references in each one are now placed in separate uniquely identified folders. Each folder has an alphanumerical identity, dependent on the length of the name for the baseline. This is twice the length of the baseline name.
The Baseline Folders containing the Cross Reference folders.
Inside each of these folders are 4 files containing the cross references and their attributes. The files will be different sizes depending on the number of cross references that existed at the time the baseline was taken.
Baselines Cross Reference Folders
Folder Maintenance.
As these are individual baselines, a user can then zip these folders and remove them from the Baseline folder. Taking the four older folders, they total approximately 232KB on disk. If a user zips each folder it comes to 3KB each. If zipped into 1 file it comes to 9KB and so a saving of over 220KB.
Baselined Cross Reference Folders after zipping
Most databases are much later than this and so the space saving could be much larger. The user could also move the zipped files to a different server if required and so saving more space.
The only downside to doing this, is that if a user wishes to use Baseline Mode to see the cross references in a baseline, they will not instantly be there. Therefore, should the cross references be required in the future, just unzip the file into the original folder. Once the file is unzipped, a user can set the Baseline Mode and they will see the old cross references.
Related Articles
For a longer more in depth description of Baselines and Configuration Management click here.
We are sometimes asked if it is possible to export the contents of individual baselines. Most commonly for baselines that have been closed in the past. The short answer is yes, and here’s how:
Select the Review tab, then ‘Set Mode’ and choose the baseline to be exported
Select the Project tab, then ‘Export’ and specify the type(s) of information to export and set the owner to ‘Project’
Specify an output filename and any other options needed, and select ‘Export’
Note: You should NOT try to import information into old baselines. This is because:
You could easily create inconsistencies in baseline histories that could also prevent the Configuration Management System (CMS) from working correctly
It breaks the principles of good CM and your formal CM process
We are pleased to announce that we released Cradle-7.1.2 last month, with some useful new features and some fixes. We have sent announcement e-mails to all customers with active maintenance, and sent e-mails to the customers whose enhancements that have been added, and whose reported bugs have been fixed.
Some of the new features in this release are:
– Equipments in Physical Architecture Diagrams can be expanded to IDEF0 diagrams, as well as the other diagram types – Faster processing of baseline operations to retire and reinstate items – You can specify a date range for the change history entries to be shown in views – A skill linked to an item type can provide RO access to all items of the type – The External Command Interface includes new events for schema changes and operations on user profiles
If you upgrade to Cradle-7.1.2 anywhere, you must upgrade everywhere, the server and all clients.
Customers who purchased a single-user Cradle-7.1 product can also apply this new release.
