Migrating from Metrics Dashboard to Model Design Dashboards

Create and Open Project

To use the Model Design Dashboards, your models must be inside a project. The project folder, and referenced project folders, define the scope of the artifacts that the dashboard metrics analyze and help the dashboard to detect when metric results become outdated. If you already have a project that contains your model, open the project. Otherwise, you can create a project directly from your model or create an empty project. For more information, see Create Project to Use Model Design and Model Testing Dashboards.

Open Dashboard and Enable Artifact Tracing

After you open your project, open a Model Design Dashboard. On the Project tab, in the Tools section, click Model Design Dashboard.

When you open a dashboard for a project for the first time, the Enable Artifact Tracing dialog box opens and prompts you to enable artifact tracing for the project. The dashboard uses artifact tracing to create a digital thread that monitors the project for changes and identifies whether the changes invalidate the metric results. Click Enable and Continue to create a digital thread for the project.

The Dashboard window opens and automatically opens a Model Design dashboard tab for a model in the project. The Dashboard window provides a centralized location where you can open dashboards for the models in your project, view metric results, analyze affected artifacts, and generate reports on the quality and compliance of the artifacts in your project. For more information, see Analyze Your Project with Dashboards.

Review Units and Components

Your software units and components appear in the Project panel in the Model Design Dashboards. A unit is a functional entity in your software architecture that you can execute and test independently or as part of larger system tests. A component is an entity that integrates multiple testable units together. By default, the dashboard considers each Simulink model inside your project folder as a unit and each System Composer™ architecture model as a component. The dashboard categorizes models as units and components because software development standards, such as ISO 26262-6, define objectives for unit testing. The Model Design Dashboard analyzes units in your project. The Model Maintainability Dashboard analyzes both units and components. For more information, see Categorize Models in Hierarchy as Components or Units.

If you want to exclude certain models from the dashboard, specify which models are units or components by labeling them in your project and configuring the dashboard to recognize the label, as shown in Specify Models as Components and Units. If you expect a model to appear in the Project panel and it does not, see Fix Artifact Issues.

Fix Artifact Issues

The dashboard finds artifact issues in the project that lead to unsaved information, portability issues, or ambiguous relationships between artifacts. These issues can cause certain artifacts not to appear in the dashboard, which can lead to incorrect metric results. To investigate artifact issues, click the Traceability tab, then click the Artifact Issues button. The warning and error icons in the dashboard toolstrip indicate the artifact issues. For information on how to view artifact issues, see View Artifact Issues in Project. For information on how to fix artifact issues, see Resolve Missing Artifacts, Links, and Results.

Collect Dashboard Results

The Model Design Dashboards collect metric data from the model design artifacts in your project to help you assess the size, architecture, and complexity of your design. The dashboard can collect these metrics without needing to compile the model and can automatically identify outdated metric results when artifacts in the project change.

To view information about a metric and how the dashboard calculates the metric value, point to a widget, then point to the three dots in the top-right corner of the widget, and click the Help icon . For an overview of the Model Design Dashboards and metrics, see Assess Model Design Using Model Design Dashboard and Monitor Design Complexity Using Model Maintainability Dashboard.

Update Programmatic Metric Collection

For the Metrics Dashboard, you use a slmetric.Engine object to collect metric results. For the Model Design Dashboards, you use a metric.Engine object to collect metric results. The way you collect metrics programmatically is similar for both dashboards, but you need to update your code. This table shows the programmatic differences in how you collect metric results for a model, in this case the number of Simulink blocks in a model named myModel. For more information, see metric.Engine and Collect Model Maintainability Metrics Programmatically.

metric_engine = slmetric.Engine();

metric_engine = metric.Engine();

setAnalysisRoot(metric_engine,'Root','myModel','RootType','Model');

execute(metric_engine,'mathworks.metrics.SimulinkBlockCount');

model = "myModel";
storageMap = digitalthread.StorageMap.forProject();
load_system(model);
modelID = digitalthread.uri.simulink.fromObject(storageMap,get_param(model,"Handle"));
metricID = "modeldesign.SimulinkMaintainability[]";
results = execute(metric_engine,metricID,ScopeId=modelID)

results = getMetrics(metric_engine,'mathworks.metrics.SimulinkBlockCount');

results = getMetrics(metric_engine,"modeldesign.SimulinkMaintainability[slcomp.DesignSummary]");
v = results.Value

v = 

  struct with fields:

    AccumulatedElements: 8
                 Blocks: 55
             Complexity: 9
                  Gotos: 0
     HalsteadDifficulty: 25.5609
            SignalLines: 88

modelMetrics = slmetric.metric.getAvailableMetrics();

designMetricIDs = getAvailableMetricIds(metric_engine,App="DashboardApp",Dashboard="ModelUnitDesign");
maintainabilityMetrics = getAvailableMetricIds(metric_engine,App="DashboardApp",Dashboard="ModelMaintainability");

Choose Which Metrics to Collect

The Model Design Dashboards provide size, architecture, complexity, diagnostic, and reuse metrics that are similar to the Size Metrics, Architecture Metrics, and other metrics in the Metrics Dashboard. Some Metrics Dashboard metrics, such as the Readability Metrics and the Model Advisor metrics in the Compliance Metrics, are not supported. For more information, see Limitations.

These tables summarize how metrics in the Metrics Dashboard relate to metrics in the Model Design Dashboards.

Size Metrics

Architecture Metrics

Compliance Metrics

Readability Metrics

Dashboard for Subsystem

The Model Design Dashboards cannot open a dashboard directly on a subsystem or display the subsystem metric results in the dashboard widgets. However, when you click a widget in the Model Design or Model Maintainability Dashboard, the app provides a table of detailed metric results for individual Simulink model layers, MATLAB functions and methods, and Stateflow objects. For an example of the detailed metric results in the Model Maintainability Dashboard, see the Metric Details in Monitor Design Complexity Using Model Maintainability Dashboard.

Modeling Guideline Compliance

The Model Design Dashboards do not provide compliance metrics for Model Advisor check issues. If you use the Modeling Guideline Compliance group in the Metrics Dashboard, consider using the Model Guidance Dashboard instead.

Actual Reuse and Potential Reuse

The Model Design Dashboard provides different metrics for reuse. You can identify opportunities for reuse by using the referenced model, linked library, subsystem reference, and Clone Detector results in the Model Design Dashboard. For more information, see Design References and Clone Detection.

Custom Metrics

The Model Design Dashboards do not support custom metrics. If you have custom metrics, such as MATLAB classes that inherit from the abstract base class slmetric.metric.Metric and Compliance Metrics for Model Advisor Configurations, contact MathWorks^® Consulting Services for help creating custom metrics for the Model Design Dashboard and Model Maintainability Dashboard.

Custom Dashboard Layout

The Model Design Dashboards do not support customizing the dashboard layout or other dashboard functionality, such as compliance thresholds. To see an example of the dashboard layout for the Model Design Dashboard and Model Maintainability Dashboard, see Assess Model Design Using Model Design Dashboard and Monitor Design Complexity Using Model Maintainability Dashboard. If you require a different layout for your dashboard widgets, containers, and custom widgets, use the Metrics Dashboard.