Project Administration – Cross Reference Integrity Checks

This blog follows on from our previous blog about project integrity checks. Here we discuss a second project integrity tool which concerns the validity of cross references. This can be found in the Project ribbon:

Project ribbon
Cross Reference Integrity Check option

As with the Item Integrity Checker, the user MUST have ACCESS_BYPASS privilege to instigate any changes to the data. It is highly recommended that there are no other active users in the database.

In fact, we would recommend locking a project using Project Manager prior to using these utilities if you cannot be certain that other users would not try to log on during the process of running the utilities.

Also, it is highly recommended to back up your database and/or create a snapshot prior to instigating any changes using these utilities.

For details about snapshots, refer to the following help page.

Cross Reference Integrity Checker

The Cross Reference Integrity Checker consists of several checks that compare the links found in the database with the rules specified in Project Setup. Some of the issues found can be repaired with a single click.

There are some checks that would not be required in normal Cradle usage but could appear as a result of an import. An example of this could be due to the fact that Cradle has the ability to import cross references independently of any item types and specify the from item and the to item. These items referred to in the cross references by their identity attribute, might not exist in the database so this is an example of a dangling cross reference.

Cross Reference Integrity Checks

Other checks are:

  • Duplicate cross references
  • Reversed hierarchical cross references – where the from item has an identity that suggests it to be the child of the to item. For example, a cross reference that is from item 1.2.3 to item 1.2. The usual action is to fix the cross references which will reverse them.
  • Cross references to be reversed – where the link rules specified in Project Setup state that the link between the checked items should be in the opposite direction in order to be valid.
  • Cross references needing a new link type – where it detects cross references that are invalid according to the current link rules but which become valid if their link type is changed
  • Invalid cross references
  • Cross reference cardinality – detects cross references whose cardinality does not match the current link rules
  • Cross reference attributes – checks the cross reference attributes, e.g., if there was information in a cross reference attribute (e.g. Reason) and was removed in a way other than through the UI, this check will flag the cross reference.
Cross Reference Integrity dialog
Cross Reference Integrity dialog

These checks will provide both a report and a summary in the dialog.

Example Cross Reference Integrity Report
Example Cross Reference Integrity Report
Example Cross Reference Integrity dialog
Example Cross Reference Integrity dialog

In this example, 154 of the cross references that exist in the database would be valid if they were reversed. So clicking the Fix button would repair those links with a single click.

Summary

We have addressed some of the checks that can be run on items to confirm the validity of cross references.

Please remember that the user MUST have ACCESS_BYPASS privilege to instigate any changes to the data. It is highly recommended that there are no other active users in the database.

Product Range – Cradle Enterprise

Cradle Enterprise Overview

Collaborative Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle Enterprise is a complete multi-user solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, logical, process, architecture or design models in SysML, UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS and other notations. Optionally group models in hierarchies and link elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

Control the work with team hierarchies, roles and access controls. Review items with discussions, user-defined workflows and built-in CM with baselines, full version control and formal change management.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as a URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use through point-and-click UIs.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle Enterprise Features
Cradle Enterprise Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle Enterprise Characteristics
Cradle Enterprise Characteristics

Cradle Enterprise is part of the Cradle product range that includes low cost, single-user tools.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE
  • Test execution / risk management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V and compliance management
  • Reporting / document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • User-defined UIs
  • Custom web UIs
  • Configuration management
  • Multi user

Product Range – Cradle-SE Pro

Cradle-SE Pro Overview

Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-SE Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, architecture, logical, process or design models using UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS, SysML and other notations. Group models in hierarchies and link all elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-SE Pro Features
Cradle-SE Pro Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-SE Pro Characteristics
Cradle-SE Pro Characteristics

Cradle-SE Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-SE Desktop

Cradle-SE Desktop Overview

Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-SE Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, process, architecture and design models using UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS, SysML and other notations. Group models in hierarchies and link all elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-SE Desktop Features
Cradle-SE Desktop Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-SE Desktop Characteristics
Cradle-SE Desktop Characteristics

Cradle-SE Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-RM Pro

Cradle-RM Pro Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as a URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-RM Pro Features
Cradle-RM Pro Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-RM Pro Characteristics
Cradle-RM Pro Characteristics

Cradle-RM Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-RM Desktop

Cradle-RM Desktop Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:
Cradle RM Desktop Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle RM Desktop Characteristics
Cradle RM Desktop Characteristics

Cradle-RM Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

October 2022 – Newsletter

Welcome to the October 2022 newsletter from 3SL that provides a mixture of news and technical information about us, and our requirements management and systems engineering tool “Cradle”. We would especially like to welcome everyone who has purchased Cradle in the past month and those who are currently evaluating Cradle for their projects and processes.

We hope that we, and Cradle, can deliver real and measurable benefits to all of the exciting development projects that we see every day through your regular contacts with our support team. If you have any problems, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL support here.

32-Bit vs 64-Bit

For our next major release – Cradle-8.0 we are considering stopping support for:

  • 32-bit Windows
  • 32-bit Microsoft Office
  • 32-bit Linux

We would like to understand if this affects any of our current customer’s and potential prospects.  If you can find the time, please provide your views/opinions to our Support Team at support@threesl.com.

Please note that Cradle-8.0 will not be released until mid 2023 at the earliest.

Upcoming Training Courses

We still have places left on our two remaining Cradle training courses this year.

The next scheduled course is the Cradle Document Publisher course. The dates are 17th to 20th October. Document Publisher is a Windows® based publishing tool that allows professional documentation to be produced directly from the data within your project’s database. Fully understanding how to configure templates and data manipulation will offer the best output for you to provide to your stakeholders, customers, regulators and other interested parties.

The last scheduled course of 2022 is the Cradle Requirements Management course. The dates of this course are 21st to 24th November. This is a great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with RM and Cradle.

Both courses are conducted over four ½ days.

Don’t miss out! To book a place on one of our online courses please click here!

Training Course Calendar 2023

We are currently preparing our training course calendar for 2023. This will be available soon.

The courses available in 2023 are:

  • Project Administration:
    Public Online Training Course
    Cradle Training Courses
    • January and July
  • User:
    • January and July
  • Requirements Management:
    • February and August
  • Document Publisher:
    • March and September
  • Risk Management:
    • April and October
  • Test Management:
    • May and November
  • Configuration Management:
    • June and December

Dates to be confirmed.

Making SWIFT Payments

Recently we have noticed some minor issues with receiving swift payments. If payments are to be made by SWIFT using a MT103 instruction, please ensure Field 71A is set to OUR instead of SHA.

Social Media

Last month we discussed:

We also paid our respects to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Thank You

3SL would also like to thank all of our customers/evaluators/prospects who have found the time to send feedback on our services, e.g. training courses, Cradle support etc. We understand how busy you are, but these responses help us to both monitor and look to improve the services we provide to you. Thank you.

Thank You
Thank you from 3SL

That’s all for our October 2022 newsletter.

Moving Cradle Projects

Are you upgrading/updating your servers? Here we explain moving Cradle projects from an old server to a new server. There are two ways to do this:

  • Moving projects to a new server with the same Cradle version
  • Moving projects to a new server and upgrading to a new Cradle version

Both of these scenarios are detailed below.

Please note if users have Personal definitions, e.g. if they are are using Sessions, these will either need to be copied or exported and imported to the new server. Personal definitions are located in $CRADLEHOME\admin\definitions\personal and the folders have the users names. If copying the definitions they need to be placed in the same location within the personal folder.

New Server with Same Cradle Version

If you are not upgrading Cradle at this time, this is really simple to do.

  1. Create the Cradle projects on the new server with the same project code as previously created on the old server. Ensure the pathname is the location where the databases will be stored.

    Create Project dialog
    Create Project dialog
  2. Copy the contents of the Cradle projects on the old server to the new server. The directory contains all of the data including user profiles, project setup, definitions etc.
    Explorer showing project contents
    Project Contents

    New Server with New Cradle Version

If you are upgrading the Cradle version as well as migrating to a new server, this is slightly more complex.

The safest method (although can be time consuming) is to create export files of the existing Cradle databases and then import them into the new server installation.

  1. When exporting the information from the “old” server, ensure Owner is set to Everything as shown below:Export Information dialog showing Owner option
  2. Once the new version of Cradle has been installed on the new server, you need to create the Cradle projects on the new server.
  3. In the new project you can then import the data exported from the old server . When importing, ensure Owner is set to As in file, Overwrite is set to On and the top four validation checkboxes are selected:Import Information dialog showing import options
  4. Repeat this for all projects

Another way to achieve this is to copy the project directories from the old server on to the new server and then manually convert the projects.

  1. Create the Cradle projects on the new server with the same project code as previously created on the old server with the pathname being the location where the databases will be stored.

    Create Project dialog
    Create Project dialog
  2. Copy the contents of the Cradle projects on the old server and overwrite the contents of the newly created projects on the new server. The directory contains all of the data including user profiles, project setup, definitions etc.
  3. Manually run the necessary converters to ensure the new projects are in the same format as the new Cradle version installed. Please note this may be several converters if converting from a much older version.

Note: Please ensure the projects have been converted BEFORE logging in.

Create a New Database Based upon a Previous Database

The Problem

I want to create a new database that is a copy of a pre-existing database minus the actual data.

Cradle Project Environment

The environment for the Cradle project will contain:

  • Project Setup
  • Supporting definition files (views, forms, queries, documents etc.)
  • Users*

*If you will have the same users in the new project that are in the existing project.

The Solution

To avoid the Personal and/or User definition files being part of this import, we would suggest the following:

  1. Log in to the existing project as MANAGER
  2. Select Project > Export
  3. In the Export dialog set Owner to  Everything and Info Type to Project Schema and User Profiles (if users are required, see comment above)

Screenshot showing export of project schema and user profiles

  1. Press Export to create the export file and close the Export Status dialog but do NOT close the Export Information dialog:Screenshot showing Export Status
  2. In the Export Information dialog, change the Info Type to ONLY show Definition Files:
    Screenshot showing Export Definition Files
  3. You will see that some new options appear – Definition Type and Location:
    Screenshot showing Info Type Definitions filter in Export
  4. The Definition Type option allows you to specify the types of definition file to be included in the export. For this example, we will leave this as All:
    Screenshot showing Definition Types in Export
  5. The Location option defines which location you are exporting the definition files from.
    Users may have created Personal or User definition files that might not be relevant to the new project.
    Personal and/or User definitions might only have been useful to an individual person rather than the project so could be omitted.
    In this case, we would only need to select Team*, User Type* and Project

    * It may only be necessary to select Project

    Screenshot showing Location of definitions in Export

  6. Press the Export button again. This will present you with the option to Overwrite, Append or Cancel. Select Append:
    Screenshot showing Overwrite or Append
  7. In Project Manager, create your new project with an EMPTY schema:
    Screenshot showing Create New Empty Project
  8. Log into the new project as MANAGER
  9. Select Project > Import and set Owner to As in File and Overwrite to On:
    Screenshot showing Import Information
  10. You will see that your new project contains:
  • Users
  • All the Project Setup information including the phase hierarchy and all supporting definition files

Summary Note

If you had NOT chosen to append the definition files, it is highly likely that the phase hierarchy from the existing project would not work in the new project and would produce errors.

These definition files are important to define the WorkBench environment.

Also, if you had chosen to export all the definition files, this may have resulted in numerous views, forms, queries, documents etc., that are not particularly relevant or accepted into project definitions.

Managing Projects

Managing Projects in Cradle

When you have a large number of projects and users it can get difficult to track them all. Project Manager, part of the Cradle suite, provides a method to hierarchically organise, categorise and sort your projects.

Project Manager showing projects in folder organisation.
Organise projects in Project Manager

Classification / Categorisation

A Project may belong to more than one sub category, “Mechanical Department” and “Current Project”, you can place a link to the project in each of these folders. In the future the link may be in the “Mechanical Department” and “Completed” folders, its up to you. Project manager can also add a host of user defined categorisations and references. This will help identify a project and its associated contracts or references,  now and in years to come.

Attributes

You can set attributes for each project. These can provide extra details about the project’s purpose, status, dates and so on. Project Manager ships with nine default attributes, however, you can add your own or change those supplied.

  • Alias  ‘Alias ID for the project, such as an alternative project ID number’
  • Division ‘General Description such as the company division doing the project’
  • Branch ‘General description such as the company branch doing the project’
  • Customer ‘General description such as the name of the customer for the project’
  • Reference ‘General Description such as the RFP or ITT reference number’
  • ‘Inception Date’ ‘General description such as the start date of the project’
  • Purpose ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
  • Summary ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
  • Description ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
Showing the range of Project Attributes that can be set for a project

    Setting Project Attributes

Continue reading “Managing Projects”