Caliber RM Tip: Dealing with Those Pesky Locked Requirements

If you've used Caliber in a location where your connection is a bit sketchy, you've probably been frustrated by some of the behavior that occurs when your connection is dropped. One of the most insidious problems with having your connection drop and reconnect is the dreaded "Locked Requirement". If you are in the middle of editing a requirement, Caliber RM locks the requirement from use by any other user. This is normally a good thing, since it prevents other users on the same project from wiping out your changes. However, when your connection drops, Caliber doesn't release the lock. The outcome of this is that upon reconnection, the requirement will still be locked under the original session, meaning that you won't be able to do anything with the locked requirement. Typically when this happens, Caliber displays the following message: "The object requested is currently locked by (Username)." When I first saw this, my first response was, "But I am (Username)! Why don't you unlock it?!" Well, the error message isn't technically giving you enough information to diagnose the problem. What it should say is "The object requested is currently locked by (Username) Session (Session ID)." You'll see why below.

To unlock the requirement, open Caliber Administrator. If you don't have access to Administrator for your project, have someone below perform the following steps in Administrator:

1. Click on the "Monitor" Icon. This is an Icon that looks lilke a little gear in the menu bar. This shows you all the active connections.
   
2. If you're unable to edit a requirement that has been locked, you'll probably notice that there are multiple active connections for your username.
3. Start by killing the oldest session associated with your username first. Look at the "Session ID" column all the way to the right. Right-click on the row which has the lowest-numbered session ID with your username (be sure not to kill your Caliber Administrator Session!)
   
4. Click "Logout". This should kill the session under which the requirement was locked. Go back to Caliber RM and see if you are able to edit the requirement which was locked.
5. If you are still unable to edit the requirement, have everyone who is working in Caliber save their work and Logout. Go back to Administrator and kill all the Caliber RM sessions.

After performing the above steps, everything should be copasetic. You should now have the ability to edit the previously locked requirement.