Understanding requirement and architecture structures

Requirement specification and block structures define a hierarchical structure of requirements, paragraphs, functions, logical blocks, and other blocks. These items can be nested from the primary level, directly below a specification or block structure, to progressively subordinate levels.

A plus sign (+) appears to the left of each item that has one or more subordinates, or children, at the next lower level. You can view only these direct children, which may themselves have children that extend the structure to even lower levels. Or, you can view the entire structure below the item, displaying its direct children and all lower level items simultaneously.

You can set the number of structures of the same type that you can open by setting the MEMaxOpenViewsSameType preference. The default value is 10. Set this value to a higher number to open more than 10 structures of the same type in the Systems Engineering application. For example, you can open 10 or more requirement specification documents simultaneously for editing and viewing.

Systems Engineering structure views display icons that indicate the object types of the structure elements. In the Business Modeler IDE, default icons can be customized for existing object types, and icons for new object types can be defined. Other images can be overlaid on icons to show the states of objects according to specific property values. For example, an overlay can show whether or not objects of that type are currently checked out.