USA

Travel fun

This week I’m in the US, Detroit to be precise. Flew in last week on Friday. First to Fort Myers of course, my good friend Arno lives there and I always visit him when I’m in the US.

I always say: Florida is Paradise. Nothing better than drive around in a convertible in South-West Florida. Weather is always good (Well… if there is no hurricane….) and the life is generally good there.

But on sunday afternoon, we (Me and my son Robbert) had to leave paradise to go to Motown.

That was easier said then done, Delta had an airplane ready but apparently some important piece was missing and it was not allowed to fly without it. (They refered to the part as “cover” which sounded pretty innocent to me…) So they had to get a new part, it turned out they had one in Fort Lauderdale. Close enough (100 miles, 160km through the air) but somehow they could not really get an airplane ready to fly it over. They’d also sent a car and that finally arrived 4 hours after the original time of start….

Fixing the plane took 2 minutes and then we could board. We had planned to arrive in Detroit at 19h but it became 23:30. Not cool. The hotel was also almost 50km from the airport so after checking in and unpacking it was 1 o’clock. The alarm was set to 6… short night.

What are we going to do in Motown? Well… as usual I cannot give any names but I’m visiting a couple of automotive companies (Now that is a tough guess….) and on Thursday we have our engineering@scale Tech Day. In the GM Heritage center, that’s going to be fun.

Rhapsody Q&A

We had a Rhapsody Q&A Session on monday. In German. There were some interesting questions, I’ll try and copy some of the questions and answers.

Rhapsody Tips ‘n Tricks

Roundtrip?

Rhapsody has some default settings that are chosen, lets say, “unluckily”…. One of them is the setting for showing so-called SourceArtifacts. That is default set to “Hide” which leads to very confusing situations with people who just started using Rhapsody. The best way is to, when you start a new model, immediately select “View”, “Browser Display Options”, “Show Source Artifacts”. This will make your life easier. If you see Source Artifacts in your Browser and you didn’t change anything: Loose them! (Right click, delete from model)

Another good one is to set the “C_Roundtrip::General::RoundtripScheme” Property to “Basic” or “Advanced”. This will prevent Rhapsody to try to include your typing errors in a model. You can still edit the body of your operations and the Enter/Exit code of state-charts/actions. With Advanced you can even add operations and attributes in an editor.

Rhapsody performance

Rhapsody is slow when model are bigger. That was not a question but the actual finding of a user. How can I make Rhapsody faster, especially the loading of “larger” models?

• You can do load on demand. If you call the “Open” dialog you seen on the far right a few fields that you can tick: “With/Without Subunits”, “restore Last Session” and “Load on Demand”. You can only load the base rpy file and load the rest when you need it (Right click, “Load…” or “Load with subunits”, speaks for itself) When you close the model, “Restore..” will open only the stuff you had already opened and “Load On Demand” should open only the stuff you are using, unfortunately it is not implemented 100% yet. But try it, it will save some time.
• Using your model from an SSD drive will greatly improve user experience… Using your model on a network drive will drive you nuts.
• Having many properties seem to slow down the loading also, apparently Rhapsody needs to build the property tree and that takes time when it has a lot of overrules.
• If you can: divide your model into multiple sub-models that you load “by reference”

Larger Models

Divide your model into multiple models that you can include where needed. If you have a model that has a certain driver in there, you can copy that into another model (Open a new model, do “Add to Model”, locate the .rpy file, click on “As Unit” and “Copy Into Model”. Then select the package you want “Tick “Add Dependencies” as well) This way the model has new GUIDs and there will be no conflicts when you use the package.
Save and and then you can open the original model, ditch the package you just copied and do “Ad To Model” again, this time adding the packag from the new model “As Reference”.

You can no longer edit the package(But you shouldn’t either!!) You can, however, create a Workspace and load all the models you use into it. You can then switch projects without opening and closing Rhapsody. (“File”, “Insert Project”, “Existing Project”)

So. I hope we have enough time this week to explore Detroit (Motown) a ittle bit better. The Skyline at night looks good!

That’s it for now: Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)