Tag: project schema

Every Cradle project is created with a default project schema. The Project Setup tool is used to change the default values, to enable the project to be configured to meet your needs.

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Item Attributes

Item Attributes

Items have attributes that describe the item and store its data. Item attributes are used to sort, categorise and group items. They also hold the unique data forming the main purpose of the item. There are three main kinds of attribute:

    •  Predefined – used to manage items, and include attributes such as name, number, version, owner, security classification and last modification date.
    •  Categories – small amounts of data as free text, single value picklists or multiple value picklists, or abstract data types such as dates or reals. These are also primary database indexes.
    • Frames – attributes for storing large amounts of data, as text or binary. These can be queried but are not primary indexes.

     

  • The predefined attributes are always present. You can inspect their values, query the database to retrieve items based on the values of these attributes, and in some cases, directly set the values of the attributes. for example The key, group, comment or description. Other predefined attributes are central to Cradle’s access control mechanisms and the Cradle configuration management system (CMS). These are set by Cradle, for example modified date or status, they cannot be directly modified. You cannot remove predefined attributes from an item.To change the item’s user definable attributes, you will need to go to Project Setup and in Options select Item Definitions as shown below
    Attributes
    Project Setup – Item Definitions

     

  • Here you will be able to add, modify and remove an item type’s attributes. For example if you wanted to add a picture to an item type, you could pick the JPEG frame type. If you needed to add CAD drawing file, you would define a frame type to hold the data and then add an instance of this to each of the item types needing to store this information.

Hierarchical Numbering

The hierarchical number describes an item’s position in the hierarchy. It is usually stored in the Key attribute but it can be stored in a category if you wish. Hierarchical numbers are not fixed. They can be changed and reorganised.

  1. A prefix (this is optional)
  2. A separator
  3. A number

The hierarchical separator can be:

  • A dot or period (this is the default), e.g. fred.1.2.3
  • A hyphen, e.g. fred-1-2-3
  • A slash, e.g. fred/1/2/3
  • For further information regarding attributes please click here
Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Expaned on how the key attribute is special to control hierarchies
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Item’s Edit History

Who Changed That? When? Why?

When working in large teams or over a long period an item’s edit history is very useful.

Each item type can have history turned on in the Project Schema via the Project Setup dialog. Users can choose what stage to enable history, Never, Always, Changing draft items that have a baselined instance, Named category matches specified value.

Right clicking on the item and selecting the History -> View Item History. The resulting dialog shows who changed the item on what date and what time. It also displays a comment (This can be made mandatory) entered at the time of editing. If an entry is selected in this list, full details are shown in the lower half of the dialog. If there are a large number of changes, the filter at the top of the dialog can aid finding a relevant change.

Dialog showing an item's edit history
Item’s Edit History

Item History in a Web Browser

Web Access allows you to see an item’s history too. This functionality is in our shipped web UIs. It can be added to your own custom UIs, see the ‘history’ template information.

Web Access showing an item's history
Item History in Web Access
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Project Schema Report Options

New Cradle 7.2 Reports Feature

It just grew and grew and grew…..

As more functionality is constantly being added to Cradle, the number of elements in the project schema grow. If you want to study only part of the schema, the report could be quite long and unwieldy. Cradle 7.2 allows users to select the portions of the schema they want to show in a report.

Shows selection of part of the project schema and resultant report
Report parts of the project schema

New Cradle 7.3.1 Reports Feature

We’ve made coloursets report more clearly in the Schema Report.

option dialog and result for schema coloursets
Coloursets – Report

Coloursets are a means to easily and consistently apply foreground and background colours to diagram symbols, or item type definitions. you can see more information in the Cradle help.

Copying a Schema

Once you have set up a schema, you can always copy it to a new project.

 

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Contents of a Cradle database

Each Cradle database contains different sets of information. These can be imagined as layers, where each layer uses the data in the layers below it. For example, cross references cannot exist until the items exist whose relationships are shown by the cross reference. These layers are, highest to lowest:

1. Cross references – the links between the data
2. Items – the data
3. Definitions – how to find, view and report the data
4. User profiles – who can own and access the data
5. Schema – the structure of the data
Cradle database layers
You can export/import each layer individually, or in any combination, or all layers. You should only import a layer of information if the lower layers already exist in the database (unless you know that it is safe).

To initialise a new database from an existing database, you need as a minimum:

– The schema
– Definitions

User profiles are needed to use a database and may be needed for some parts of the schema (such as workflows and alerts) and definitions (user and personal scopes).

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Describe Your Schema to Help Your Users

Schema

The structure of each Cradle database is defined by it’s schema. This contains many parts, but the most fundamental are the ‘item types‘ for the types of information that Cradle will manage and the category and frame attributes of these item types.

Item Types, Categories and Frames

When you define the schema, you can specify a ‘description‘ for all of these parts, including:

  • Item types
  • Category codes
  • Each value in a category code that is a pick-list of value(s)
  • All frames
Setting schema descriptions in Cradle for categories and their values
Schema Descriptions

Setting Schema Descriptions

These descriptions are very useful to end users, because Cradle will display them as tooltips in the UI (User Interface). For example, when the user moves to set a category value, Cradle will display:

showing descriptions within tooltips for categories, their values and frames
Category and Frame Tooltips
  • The description of the category
  • The description of the current category value

When a user moves into the heading for a frame, the UI will display the description of that frame as a tooltip.

Link Rules

A comment as to the purpose of the link rule can be added to the schema. This is a useful aide-mémoire to those editing the rules. However, if a certain action is prohibited by the rules, then the user is shown why.

In this example two rules have been set up, one to allow user Alan to modify sub-part to component links and another to prevent all users modifying the same link. Because of the top-down sequence of rule matching this has the effect of allowing only Alan to modify cross references of this type. The example shows Dewi trying to modify the link attributes between the Pump parent component and the Pump housing linked as a sub-component. The warning shows why this alteration was prevented. The text from the schema is shown in the dialog.

documenting the link rule purpose in the schema allows the user to be shown the reason an action was rejected
Link Rule Documentation

Groups

Within Cradle item types can have a number of different categories. Some item types may share the same categories, others may use unique values.

The Group field is available across the whole project. When the schema contains a number of entries for the Group field, these can be applied to any item type. If the project defines values for the Group, selection is only from the defined list. If no pick-list is defined, it is simply a free-form text field, to use as the user wishes.

Showing the setup of group descriptions in the schema and tooltips in a form
Group Descriptions

This example shows three types of assets, Capital, Inventory and Liquid. Some item types may only fall into one group, in this example a physical bedroom is going to be a capital asset, the guest supplies are liquid assets. However, when it comes to fittings, the light is being grouped with the Capital assets and the bed and so on in the Inventory group.

However you choose to use this cross item categorisation, the descriptions given to the group show as tooltips when hovering over the group field in a form.

Article updated 17/09/2018 – Cleaned up post
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Copy a Schema

Scenario

Having developed a schema, added item types, defined workflows, tailored categories to your process, a new project starts. The last thing you want to do is start from scratch defining the it all over again.

Solution

If you have a really useful setup that you want to reuse in a new project then simply “drag’n’drop” it in Project Manager. Log into the projects with a user with privilege to import project settings and then drag the schema from the developed project to your new project. The alternative would be to export just the project schema from your original project and then import it into the new project. Whatever you do, you don’t need to start typing and clicking to create a new project setup.

Project Manager copy schema
Copy a Project Schema

Reporting on a Project Schema

Choose the elements of the schema report most suitable
Schema Report Details

In order to see the Project Schema in a tabular form, log into the project from Project Manager and simply select the Schema in the tree. Pressing the Publish button will output this as a report. If you want finder granularity of what shows in the report open WorkBench and run the Standard Report “Project  Schema” from the Publish->Reports tab.

Article Updated: 01/06/2018 – reporting