As you may have seen, 3SL has launched a new website. Our hope is that this will be a better format, focusing on how Cradle can be of benefit to you and your organization. Take a few minutes and look through the site. We have a short survey to help gather feedback or email us directly with comments and recommendations.
Making Data Hidden or Read Only
Hiding Information without Skills
If you want to hide any attributes (categories, frames, or anything else) from users, then the simplest means to do it is:
Simply not include these attributes (key, comment, frame, category or whatever) in the views and forms that you provide to the users
Do not allow these users to create their own views and forms - do not give them CREATE_DEFS privilege
Note that you can make views and forms specific to an individual user, or a team of users, or all users of a user type. So it is quite easy to have a 'special' set of views and forms for a collection of users that do not show attributes that you do not want them to see.
Using Skills to Restrict Data
Skills are user-defined 'abilities' or 'rights' that you can define in your Cradle schema. You can define a list of skills in the schema, such as 'engineer' or 'accountant' and then you can assign one or more skills to your users.
Cradle then allows you to restrict access to entire item types and to user-defined frames in item types based on skills. This means that:
You can define that a skill is needed to access an item type. If a user does not have this skill then he/she will not even know that the item type exists, cannot access items of this type, cannot run queries on items of this type and so on.
You can define that a user-defined frame in an item needs a skill and the lack of the skill either means no access to the frame, or only read-only access to the frame
So:
If you want some item type(s) to only be visible to some users, then associate a skill with the item type and only give this skill to the user(s) who should know that the item type(s) exist
If you want some users to only ever have read-only access to a frame, then associate a skill with the frame and specify that lack of the skill means read-only access and only give the skill to the users who should have read-write access to the frame (assuming that they have read-write access to the frame's item, of course!)
If you want some users to not know that a frame exists and never, ever, see it, then associate a skill with the frame and specify that lack of the skill means no access and only give the skill to the users who should have access to the frame (which will be read-write access to the frame if they have read-write access to the frame's item, and read-only access to the frame if they have read-only access to the frame's item)
Make Information Read-Only without Skills
If you want to force attributes (categories, frames, or anything else) to be read-only for users, even when they could have read-write access to these attributes, then you can do this by:
In the forms that users use to view items, set the 'read-only' checkbox for each field that displays an attribute that you want to be read-only. When you do this, the attribute will be shown read-only, even if the user has read-write access to the item containing the attribute
To make attributes read-only in views, create the view with the number of rows and columns to be used for each item, as usual, but rather than specifying an attribute (such as a category, or the Name or a frame) to be shown in a cell, set the view cell's contents to be 'Multiple' and only define one attribute in that cell. When you do this, the attributes will appear in the view as you would expect, but they will be read-only.
As you may know, the ability to display multiple attributes in a view cell is one of the many new capabilities in the Cradle-7.0 release. In this case, we use this mechanism to display a single value, and use the fact that such 'multiple' cells are always read-only to achieve the effect that we want.
Free Cradle Class
Our next free Cradle class is being offered in Huntsville July 21-23. This class allows new users to get up to speed on Cradle and those considering a purchase of Cradle to get hands on prior to buying. Let us know if you need more details or would like us to save you a seat.
AlaSim Conference Wrap-up
Loyd Baker, 3SL’s VP of Technology, presented at the AlaSim conference last week on performing time line analysis of a functional model. During the conference, a professor from a European university indicated he would like to review Cradle for possible inclusion in a book to be published as early as this fall. If you would like a briefing on doing time line analysis on your models, please feel free to contact Loyd. We will provide more information on the book possibilities once a plan is solidified.