I spent some time this month working on a requirements modeling application based on a connection to the Borland CaliberRM database using the Caliber SDK. This was a lot of fun, since I don’t usually get a chance to write a lot of code, and I wanted to share some of what I learned. I did my work using C#, but this would be applicable to any other .NET language.

Borland has provided a COM library that gives you access to the CaliberRM database. You connect to it using References, the way you would any other COM library.

Connecting to the database basically involves creating a CaliberServerFactory object, and using this to get a CaliberServer. You then log in to the CaliberServer object to get a Session object. The Session object is the heart of your connection to the database.

There’s a small bug in the Session object that manifests itself when you have deleted users from CaliberRM, but those users are still listed as being in Groups. The error occurs when you try to access a Property of the Session object. When you do this, you’ll get a scary looking COM error:

com.starbase.caliber.server.RemoteServerException: Unable to find the following IDs in call to getAllFromServer():\n\t[com.starbase.caliber.UserID[idNumber=3263840,objectClass=class com.starbase.caliber.User,remoteObjectType=Caliber.eObjectType@15ed659,hashCode()=3263840]]

Don’t sweat this. Just go to the Framework Administrator and make sure that you don’t have deleted users hanging out in groups. One of the reasons I’m blogging this is that I spent some time looking for the answer and didn’t find it, but google will catch this and file it away for others who run into this!

Once you have a Session object, you can access the Projects property to get a list of Projects and get your particular Project object. From the Project object, grab a Baseline, and you have full access to the Requirements hierarchy.